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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.)
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Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000015- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
16 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
17 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000018
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000019- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
20 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
21
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000022- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
23
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000024- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
25 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
26
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000027- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
28
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000029- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
30
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000031- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
32 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
33
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000034- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
35 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
36 Fixes bug #858016 .
37
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000038- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
39 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
40 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
41
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000042- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
43 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
44 improves their performance (about 35%).
45
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000046- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
47 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
48 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
49
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000050- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
51 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
52 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
53 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
54
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000055- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
56 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
57 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
58 length is not known).
59
60- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
61 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000062 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
63 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000064 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
65
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000066- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
67 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
68
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000069- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
70 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
71 keyword arguments.
72
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000073- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
74 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
75 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
76
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000077- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
78 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
79 cases.
80
81- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
82 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
83 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
84 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
85 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
86 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
87 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
88 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
89 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
90 a release build.
91
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000092- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
93 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
94
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000095- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000096 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000097
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000098- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
99 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
100 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
101 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
102 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
103 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
104 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
105 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
106 destroyed.
107
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000108- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
109 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
110 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
111 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
112 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
113 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
114 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
115 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
116
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000117- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
118 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
119 character other than a space.
120
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000121- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
122 by the function object or by the method object, the function
123 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
124 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
125 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
126 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
127 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
128 attributes with the same name.
129
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000130- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
131 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
132 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
133 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
134 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
135 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
136 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
137 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
138 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
139 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
140 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
141 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
142 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
143 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000144
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000145- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
146 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
147 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
148 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
149 This has been repaired.
150
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000151- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
152
153- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
154
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000155- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
156 over a sequence.
157
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000158- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000159 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000160
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000161- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
162
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000163- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
164 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
165 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
166 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
167 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
168 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
169 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
170 records with equal keys is unchanged).
171
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000172- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
173 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
174 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
175
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000176- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
177 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
178 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
179 freelist.
180
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000181- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
182 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
183
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000184- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
185 number.
186
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000187- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
188 a TypeError exception.
189
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000190- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
191 820195.
192
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000193- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
194 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
195 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
196
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000197- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
198 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
199 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000200
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000201- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
202 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
203 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
204
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000205- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
206 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000207 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000208
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000209- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000210 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
211 the first call.
212
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000213
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000214Extension modules
215-----------------
216
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000217- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
218
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000219- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
220 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
221
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000222- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
223 fewer false positives.
224
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000225- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
226 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
227
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000228- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
229 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
230
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000231- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
232 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000233 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
234 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
235 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000236
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000237- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
238 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
239 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
240 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
241
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000242- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
243 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
244 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
245 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
246 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
247 #897625.
248
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000249- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
250 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
251
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000252- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
253 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
254 and pops on either side of the deque.
255
256- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
257 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
258
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000259- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
260 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
261 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
262 other functions that expect a function argument.
263
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000264- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
265
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000266- os.getsid was added.
267
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000268- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
269 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
270 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
271
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000272- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
273
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000274- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
275
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000276- readline.clear_history was added.
277
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000278- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
279
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000280- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
281
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000282- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
283
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000284- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
285
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000286- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
287
288- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
289
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000290- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
291
292- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
293
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000294- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
295 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
296 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
297
298- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
299 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
300 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
301 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
302 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
303 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
304 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
305
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000306- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
307 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
308 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
309 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000310
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000311- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
312 iterators from a single iterable.
313
314- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
315 of raising a TypeError exception.
316
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000317- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
318 as parameter.
319
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000320Library
321-------
322
Martin v. Löwiseac324b2004-06-03 09:18:35 +0000323- asyncore.loop now has repeat count parameter that defaults to infinity.
324
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000325- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
326 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
327 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
328
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000329- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
330 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
331 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
332
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000333- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
334
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000335- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
336
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000337- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
338 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
339
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000340- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
341 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
342 type pattern with the same value exists.
343
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000344- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
345 when run from the command prompt).
346
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000347- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
348 not taken into consideration when caching value.
349
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000350- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
351 default sort).
352
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000353- Added global runctx function to profile module
354
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000355- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
356
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000357- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
358
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000359- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
360
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000361- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
362 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
363 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
364 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
365 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
366 accordingly.
367
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000368- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
369 decoding standards.
370
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000371- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
372 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
373 called for all requests.
374
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000375- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
376 they are passed to the compiler.
377
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000378- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
379 indent, width and depth.
380
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000381- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
382 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
383
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000384- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
385 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
386
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000387- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
388
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000389- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
390
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000391- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
392
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000393- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
394 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
395
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000396- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
397 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000398
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000399- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
400 a string).
401
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000402- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
403
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000404- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
405
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000406- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
407
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000408- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
409
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000410- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
411 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
412 list of fieldnames.
413
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000414- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
415 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
416
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000417- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
418
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000419- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
420 empty lists.
421
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000422- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
423 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
424 and shelves.
425
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000426- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
427 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
428
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000429- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000430 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
431 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000432
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000433- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
434 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000435 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000436
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000437- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000438 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
439 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
440
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000441- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
442 and removed in Py2.4.
443
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000444- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
445
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000446- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
447
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000448Tools/Demos
449-----------
450
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000451- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
452 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
453
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000454- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
455
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000456- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
457 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
458 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
459 destination in situations where both files are given.
460
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000461- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
462 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
463 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
464 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
465
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000466- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
467
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000468- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
469 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
470 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
471 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
472 now.
473
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000474- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
475 in effect
476
477- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
478 C-c C-h
479
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000480- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
481 -d option was given.
482
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000483Build
484-----
485
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000486- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
487 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
488
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000489- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
490 removed.
491
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000492- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
493 supported (see PEP 11).
494
495- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
496
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000497- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
498
499- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
500 (see PEP 11).
501
502- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
503 sizeof(char) must be 1.
504
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000505C API
506-----
507
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000508- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
509 generator objects.
510
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000511- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
512 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000513 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
514 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000515
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000516- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
517 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
518
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000519- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
520 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
521 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
522 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
523 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
524
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000525- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
526 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
527 about 10% faster.
528
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000529- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
530 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
531
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000532- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
533 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
534 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
535 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
536
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000537New platforms
538-------------
539
540Tests
541-----
542
543Windows
544-------
545
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000546- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
547 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
548 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
549 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
550
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000551- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
552 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
553 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
554
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000555Mac
556----
557
558
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000559What's New in Python 2.3 final?
560===============================
561
562*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
563
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000564IDLE
565----
566
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000567- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
568 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
569 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
570 context-menu actions.
571
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000572- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
573 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
574 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
575 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
576 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
577 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
578 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
579 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
580 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
581
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000582
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000583What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
584=============================================
585
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000586*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000587
588Core and builtins
589-----------------
590
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000591- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000592 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000593 comment at the end are still unsupported.
594
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000595Extension modules
596-----------------
597
598- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
599 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
600 than once. This has been fixed.
601
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000602- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
603 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
604 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
605 call.
606
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000607- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
608
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000609Library
610-------
611
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000612- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
613 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
614
615- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
616 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
617 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
618 restored.
619
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000620IDLE
621----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000622
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000623- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000624
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000625Build
626-----
627
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000628- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
629 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
630
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000631C API
632-----
633
634Windows
635-------
636
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000637- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
638 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
639
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000640- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
641
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000642Mac
643---
644
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000645- Various fixes to pimp.
646
647- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
648
649- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
650 more problems than it solves.
651
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000652
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000653What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
654=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000655
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000656*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
657
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000658Core and builtins
659-----------------
660
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000661- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
662 by sys.setcheckinterval().
663
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000664- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
665 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000666 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000667
668- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
669 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
670 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000671 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000672
673- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
674 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000675
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000676- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
677 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
678 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
679
680- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000681 770247.
682
683- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000684
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000685Extension modules
686-----------------
687
688- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
689 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
690
691- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
692
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000693- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
694
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000695- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
696 contained within the _strptime module.
697
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000698- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
699 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
700
701- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000702 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
703
704- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
705 the find_class attribute, if present.
706
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000707- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000708
709 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
710 (SF bug 763298).
711
712 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000713 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
714 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
715 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000716
717 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
718
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000719Library
720-------
721
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000722- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
723
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000724- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
725 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
726 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
727 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
728 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
729 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
730 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
731 or Tester().
732
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000733- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
734 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
735 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
736 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
737 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
738 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
739 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
740 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
741 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000742
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000743 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000744
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000745- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
746 weren't before was an oversight.
747
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000748- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
749 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
750
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000751- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
752 when there are no lines.
753
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000754- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
755 which could occur with Tk 8.4
756
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000757- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
758 to child processes.
759
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000760- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
761
762- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
763
764- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
765 xmlrpclib.
766
767- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
768 responses.
769
770- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
771 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
772
773- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
774 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
775 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
776
777- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
778 used as patterns.
779
780- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
781 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
782 than Tk 8.3.
783
784- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
785
786- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000787
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000788Tools/Demos
789-----------
790
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000791- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
792
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000793- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
794
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000795- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000796
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000797Build
798-----
799
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000800- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
801
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000802- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
803
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000804- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
805 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000806
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000807- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
808 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
809 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000810
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000811C API
812-----
813
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000814- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
815 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
816
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000817Windows
818-------
819
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000820- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
821 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
822 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
823 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
824 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
825 Python exception ::
826
827 thread.error: can't start new thread
828
829 is raised now.
830
831- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
832 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
833 instead of from DLL teardown.
834
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000835Mac
836---
837
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000838- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000839 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000840 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
841 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
842 the executable in the bundle.
843
844- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000845
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000846- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
847
848- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
849 on Panther.
850
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000851What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
852================================
853
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000854*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000855
856Core and builtins
857-----------------
858
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000859- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
860 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
861 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
862 with the -i option.
863
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000864- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
865 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
866
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000867- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
868 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
869
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000870- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
871 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
872 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
873 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
874 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
875 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
876 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
877 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
878 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
879 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
880 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
881 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
882 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000883
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000884- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
885 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
886 embedded in a lambda expression.
887
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000888- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
889 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
890 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
891 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
892 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
893
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000894- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
895 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
896 matches the restriction on classic classes.
897
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000898- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
899 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
900
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000901- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
902 It's writable again.
903
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000904- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
905 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
906 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000907 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000908
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000909- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
910 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
911 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
912
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000913Extension modules
914-----------------
915
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000916- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
917 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
918
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000919- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
920 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
921 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
922 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
923
924- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
925 collection.
926
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000927- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
928 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
929 unique within a single program run.
930
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000931- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
932 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
933
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000934- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
935 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
936
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000937- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
938 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000939
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000940- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
941
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000942- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
943 Fixes SF bug #730685.
944
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000945- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
946 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
947 for many BSD-derived systems.
948
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000949
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000950Library
951-------
952
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000953- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
954 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
955 primary ones:
956
957 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
958 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
959 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
960
961 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
962 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
963 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
964 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
965 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
966 framework features (which doctest lacks).
967
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000968- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
969 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
970 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
971 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
972 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
973 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
974 argument.
975
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000976- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
977 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
978 in the archive.
979
980- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
981 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
982
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000983- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
984 569574).
985
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000986- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
987 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
988 no more.
989
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000990- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
991 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
992 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
993 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
994 code coverage.
995
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000996- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
997 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
998 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000999 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1000 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001001
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001002- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1003 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1004 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001005 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001006
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001007- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1008
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001009- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1010 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1011 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1012 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1013
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001014- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1015 handling.
1016
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001017- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1018 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1019
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001020- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1021 in socket.py.
1022
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001023- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1024
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001025- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1026 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1027 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1028 opener with proxy support.
1029
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001030- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1031
1032- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1033
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001034Tools/Demos
1035-----------
1036
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001037- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1038
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001039- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1040
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001041- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1042 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001043
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001044- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1045 files.
1046
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001047Build
1048-----
1049
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001050- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001051 different root directory.
1052
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001053C API
1054-----
1055
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001056- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1057 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1058 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1059 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1060 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1061 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1062 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1063 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1064 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1065 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1066
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001067- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1068 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1069 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1070 from Python.
1071
1072
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001073New platforms
1074-------------
1075
1076None this time.
1077
1078Tests
1079-----
1080
1081- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1082 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1083
1084Windows
1085-------
1086
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001087- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1088
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001089- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1090 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1091 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1092 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1093 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1094 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1095 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1096 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1097 that's what it's for.
1098
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001099Mac
1100---
1101
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001102- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1103 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1104 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1105 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001106- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1107 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1108- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001109
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001110SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1111------------------------------------
1112
1113430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1114598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1115622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1116661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1117683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1118697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1119713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1120724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1121727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1122729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1123730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1124731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1125732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1126733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1127735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1128740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1129744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1130745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1131747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1132749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1133751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1134753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1135755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1136757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1137760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1138
1139
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001140What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1141================================
1142
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001143*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001144
1145Core and builtins
1146-----------------
1147
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001148- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1149 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1150
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001151- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1152 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1153 and cannot be strings).
1154
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001155- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1156 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1157 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1158 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1159
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001160- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1161 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1162 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1163 Python itself.
1164
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001165- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1166 the referenced object, if it has one.
1167
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001168- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1169 the thread started at
1170 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1171
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001172- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1173 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1174 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1175 placed on a list index.
1176
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001177- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1178 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1179 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1180 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1181
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001182- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1183 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1184 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1185 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1186 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1187 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1188 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1189
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001190- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1191 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1192 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1193 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1194 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1195
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001196- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1197 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001198
1199- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1200 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1201 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1202 #693195.)
1203
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001204- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1205 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001206
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001207- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001208 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001209 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1210 interpreter executions, would fail.
1211
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001212- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001213 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001214 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001215
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001216Extension modules
1217-----------------
1218
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001219- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1220 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1221 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1222 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1223
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001224- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1225 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1226
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001227- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1228 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1229 and Greg Chapman.)
1230
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001231- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1232 recursively.
1233
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001234- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001235 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1236 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1237 leaks.
1238
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001239- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1240
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001241- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1242 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1243 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1244 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1245 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1246 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1247 #705836.
1248
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001249- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001250 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1251
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001252- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1253 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1254 See SF bug #692416.
1255
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001256- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1257 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1258
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001259- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1260 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1261 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001262
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001263- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001264 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1265 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1266
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001267- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1268 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1269 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1270 timeouts to work properly.
1271
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001272Library
1273-------
1274
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001275- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1276 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1277 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1278 future release.
1279
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001280- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1281 for querying platform dependent features.
1282
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001283- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001284
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001285- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1286 pickle protocol versions.
1287
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001288- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1289 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1290 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1291
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001292- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1293
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001294- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1295 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1296 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1297 modules.
1298
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001299- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1300 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1301 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1302
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001303- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1304 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1305
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001306- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1307 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1308 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1309
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001310- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001311 MS Office extensions.
1312
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001313- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1314 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1315
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001316- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1317 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1318
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001319- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1320 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1321 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1322 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1323 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1324 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1325
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001326- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1327 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1328 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001329
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001330- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1331 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1332 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1333
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001334- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1335
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001336- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1337 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1338 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1339
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001340Tools/Demos
1341-----------
1342
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001343- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1344 See the module docstring for details.
1345
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001346Build
1347-----
1348
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001349- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1350 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001351
1352C API
1353-----
1354
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001355- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1356
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001357- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1358 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1359 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1360
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001361- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1362 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001363
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001364 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1365 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1366 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001367
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001368- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001369 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1370
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001371- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1372 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1373 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001374
1375New platforms
1376-------------
1377
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001378None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001379
1380Tests
1381-----
1382
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001383- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1384 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001385
1386Windows
1387-------
1388
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001389- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1390 function.
1391
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001392- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1393 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001394
1395Mac
1396---
1397
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001398- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1399 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001400
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001401- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1402 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001403
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001404- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1405 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1406 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001407
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001408- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001409 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1410 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001411
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001412- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1413 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001414
1415
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001416What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1417=================================
1418
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001419*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001420
1421Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001422-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001423
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001424- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1425 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1426 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1427
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001428- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1429 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1430 (SF patch #664376.)
1431
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001432- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1433 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1434 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1435 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1436 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1437 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001438 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001439
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001440- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1441 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1442 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1443 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001444 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001445
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001446- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1447 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1448 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1449 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1450 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1451 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1452 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1453 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1454 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1455 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1456 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1457
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001458- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1459 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1460 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1461 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1462 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1463 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1464
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001465- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1466 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1467
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001468- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1469 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1470 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1471 case.)
1472
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001473- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1474 passed as unicode strings.
1475
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001476- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1477 See SF bug #683467.
1478
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001479- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1480 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1481
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001482- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1483
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001484- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1485
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001486- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1487 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1488 arguments.
1489
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001490- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1491 See SF bug #667147.
1492
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001493- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001494 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001495 See SF bug #676155.
1496
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001497- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001498 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001499 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1500 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1501 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1502 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1503 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1504 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001505
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001506Extension modules
1507-----------------
1508
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001509- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1510 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1511 tp_as_number pointer.
1512
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001513- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1514 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1515 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1516 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1517 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1518
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001519- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1520
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001521- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1522
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001523- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001524 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001525 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1526 patch #678531.)
1527
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001528- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1529 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1530
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001531- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1532 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1533
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001534- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1535
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001536- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1537 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1538 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1539
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001540- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1541
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001542- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1543 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1544
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001545- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001546
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001547- datetime changes:
1548
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001549 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1550
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001551 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1552 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1553 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1554 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1555 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1556 now.
1557
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001558 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001559 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1560 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001561
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001562 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001563 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001564 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1565 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1566 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1567 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001568
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001569 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1570 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1571 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001572 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1573
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001574 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1575 by a later example coded by Guido.
1576
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001577 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001578 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1579 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1580 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001581 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1582 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1583
1584 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1585 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1586 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1587 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1588 tzinfo subclass instance.
1589
1590 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1591 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1592 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1593 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1594 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1595 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1596 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1597 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001598
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001599 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1600 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1601 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1602 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1603 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001604 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1605
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001606 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001607
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001608 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1609 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1610 as a naive datetime object.
1611
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001612 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1613 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1614 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1615
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001616 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1617 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1618 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1619 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1620 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1621 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1622 comparison.
1623
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001624 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1625 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1626 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1627 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001628 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001629
1630 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001631
1632 and ::
1633
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001634 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1635
1636 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1637 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1638 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1639 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1640
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001641 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1642 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1643 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1644 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1645 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1646
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001647 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1648 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001649 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1650 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001651
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001652Library
1653-------
1654
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001655- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1656 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1657
1658- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1659 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1660 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1661 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1662 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1663 See PEP 307 for details.
1664
1665- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1666 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1667
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001668- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1669 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001670 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001671 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1672 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001673 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001674
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001675- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1676 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1677
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001678- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1679 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1680 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1681
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001682- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1683
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001684- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1685 exception.
1686
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001687- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1688 class.
1689
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001690- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1691 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1692 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1693
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001694- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1695 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1696
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001697- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001698 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1699 See SF bug #659228.
1700
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001701- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1702 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1703 See SF patch #651082.
1704
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001705- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001706
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001707- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1708 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1709
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001710- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001711 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001712
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001713- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1714 DOS paths from other platforms.
1715
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001716Tools/Demos
1717-----------
1718
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001719- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1720 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1721 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1722 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1723 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1724 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1725 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1726 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1727 example:
1728
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001729 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1730 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001731
1732 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1733
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001734
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001735Build
1736-----
1737
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001738- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1739 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1740 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001741 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1742
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001743 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1744
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001745- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1746 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1747 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1748 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1749 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1750 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1751 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1752 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1753 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1754
1755- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1756 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1757 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1758 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1759
1760- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1761 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1762
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001763C API
1764-----
1765
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001766- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1767 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001768
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001769- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1770 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1771 tp_as_number pointer.
1772
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001773- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1774 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1775 (SF #681367)
1776
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001777- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1778 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1779 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1780 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001781
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001782Tests
1783-----
1784
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001785- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001786 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1787 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1788 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1789 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1790 pydoc.)
1791
1792- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1793
1794- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001795
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001796Windows
1797-------
1798
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001799- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1800 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1801 time).
1802
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001803- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1804 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1805
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001806- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1807 release without strong cryptography.
1808
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001809- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001810 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001811
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001812- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1813 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1814
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001815Mac
1816---
1817
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001818- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1819 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001820
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001821- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1822 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1823 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001824
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001825- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1826 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001827
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001828- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1829 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1830 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1831 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001832
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001833- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001834 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1835 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1836 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001837
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001838
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001839What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001840=================================
1841
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001842*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001843
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001844Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001845--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001846
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001847- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1848
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001849- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1850 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001851 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001852 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001853 a different meaning than before.
1854
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001855- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001856 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001857 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001858
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001859- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001860 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001861 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001862
1863- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1864 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1865 and deallocation.
1866
1867- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1868 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1869
1870- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1871 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1872 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1873 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1874 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1875
1876- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1877 now detected by the garbage collector.
1878
1879- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1880 [SF bug 519621]
1881
1882- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1883 identifier.
1884
1885- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1886 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1887 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1888 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1889 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1890 [SF bug 563060]
1891
1892- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1893 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1894 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1895 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1896 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1897
1898- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1899 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1900 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1901
1902- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1903
1904- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1905 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1906 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1907 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1908 state of the slots would be lost.)
1909
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001910Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001911-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001912
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001913- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001914 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1915 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1916 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1917 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001918 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1919 Jython 2.1.
1920
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001921- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001922 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001923 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1924 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1925 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1926 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1927 these, see PEP 302.
1928
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001929- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1930 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1931 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1932
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001933- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1934 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1935 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1936
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001937- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1938 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1939 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1940
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001941- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1942 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1943 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1944 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1945 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1946 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1947 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1948 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1949 releases or implementations.
1950
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001951- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001952 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1953 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001954
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001955- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1956 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1957
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001958- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1959 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1960 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1961
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001962- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1963 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1964
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001965- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1966 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001967 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1968 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001969
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001970- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1971 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1972 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1973 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1974 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1975
1976 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1977 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1978 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1979 pattern.
1980
1981 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1982 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1983 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1984 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1985
1986 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1987 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1988 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1989 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1990 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1991 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1992
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001993- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1994 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1995 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1996 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1997 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1998 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1999 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2000 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002001
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002002- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2003 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2004 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2005 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2006 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002007 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2008 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2009 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2010 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2011 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2012 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2013 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002014
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002015- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2016 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2017
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002018- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2019 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2020 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2021 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2022 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2023 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2024 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2025 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2026 to Zack Weinberg!
2027
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002028- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2029 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2030 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2031 type. This has been fixed now.
2032
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002033- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2034 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2035 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2036
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002037- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2038 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2039 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2040 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2041 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2042 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2043 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2044 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002045 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002046
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002047- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2048 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2049 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002050
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002051- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2052 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2053 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2054 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2055 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2056 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2057 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2058 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002059 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002060 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2061 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2062
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002063- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2064 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2065 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2066 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2067 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2068 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2069 this.)
2070
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002071- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2072 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002073 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002074 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002075 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2076 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002077 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2078 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002079
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002080- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2081 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2082 currently running.
2083
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002084- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2085 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2086 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2087 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2088
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002089- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2090 as directory names.
2091
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002092- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2093 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2094
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002095- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2096 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2097
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002098- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002099 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2100 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002101
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002102- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2103 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2104 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2105 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2106 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2107
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002108- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2109 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2110 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2111 removed.
2112
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002113- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2114 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2115 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2116
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002117- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2118 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2119 to __debug__.
2120
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002121- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2122 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2123 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2124
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002125- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2126 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2127 deprecated now.
2128
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002129- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2130 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2131 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002132
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002133- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2134 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2135 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2136 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2137 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002138
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002139- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2140 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2141
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002142- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2143 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2144 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002145 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002146 is backward compatible.
2147
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002148- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2149 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2150 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2151 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2152 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2153
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002154- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2155 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2156 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2157 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2158 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2159 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002160
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002161- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2162 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2163
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002164- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2165 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2166
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002167- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2168 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2169 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2170 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2171 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2172
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002173- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2174 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2175 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2176
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002177- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002178 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2179
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002180- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2181 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2182 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002183
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002184- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2185 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2186
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002187- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2188 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2189 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2190
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002191- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2192
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002193Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002194-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002195
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002196- Added three operators to the operator module:
2197 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2198 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2199 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2200
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002201- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2202
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002203- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2204 archives.
2205
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002206- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2207 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2208 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2209
2210 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2211
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002212- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2213 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2214 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002215 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002216
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002217- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2218 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2219 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2220 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002221 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2222 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2223 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2224 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002225
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002226- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2227 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002228
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002229- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2230
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002231- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2232 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2233
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002234- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2235 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2236 supported.
2237
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002238- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2239
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002240- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2241 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002242
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002243- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2244 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2245
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002246- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2247
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002248- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2249 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2250
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002251- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2252 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2253 functions but callable type objects.
2254
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002255- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002256 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002257 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002258
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002259- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2260 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002261
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002262- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2263 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002264
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002265- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2266 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2267 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2268 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2269
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002270- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2271 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002272
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002273- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2274 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2275 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2276 and __imul__.
2277
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002278- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002279 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2280 is called.
2281
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002282- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2283 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2284 interpreter was compiled.
2285
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002286- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2287 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2288 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002289 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002290 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2291 1, not 2.
2292
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002293- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2294 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2295 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2296 limit.
2297
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002298- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2299 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2300 bug #623464.
2301
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002302- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2303 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2304 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2305 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2306
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002307Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002308-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002309
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002310- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2311
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002312- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2313 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2314 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2315 with Python 2.3a2.
2316
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002317- os.path exposes getctime.
2318
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002319- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002320 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002321 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002322 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002323 unit tests of floating point results.
2324
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002325- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2326 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2327 has been increased.
2328
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002329- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2330 executed.
2331
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002332- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2333 postinstallation script.
2334
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002335- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2336 test the current module.
2337
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002338- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002339 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2340 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2341 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2342 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2343
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002344- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002345 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002346 Ward's Optik package.
2347
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002348- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2349 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2350 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2351 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2352
2353- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2354 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002355 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002356
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002357- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2358 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2359 shelf are binary pickles.
2360
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002361- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2362 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2363
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002364- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2365 modules are iterators now.
2366
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002367- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2368 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2369 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2370 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2371 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2372 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002373
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002374- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2375 with their entity value.
2376
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002377- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2378
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002379- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2380 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002381
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002382- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2383 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002384 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002385
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002386- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2387 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2388 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2389 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2390 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2391 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2392 main():
2393
2394 import locale
2395 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2396
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002397- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2398 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2399
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002400- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2401 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2402 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2403 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2404 to the new standard.
2405
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002406- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2407 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2408 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2409 an extension to the database.
2410
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002411- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2412 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2413 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2414 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002415 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002416
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002417- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002418 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002419
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002420- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2421 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2422 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2423 bounded integers.
2424
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002425- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2426 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2427 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2428 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2429 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2430 in existence.
2431
2432 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2433 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2434 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2435 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2436 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2437 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2438
2439 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2440 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2441 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2442 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2443
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002444- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2445 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2446 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2447
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002448- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2449
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002450- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2451 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2452 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2453 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2454
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002455- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2456 argument.
2457
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002458- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2459 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2460 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2461 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2462 [SF patch 560794].
2463
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002464- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2465 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2466 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002467 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2468 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2469 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002470
2471- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2472 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002473
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002474- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2475 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2476 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2477 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002478
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002479- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2480 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2481 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2482 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2483 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2484
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002485- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002486
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002487- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2488
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002489- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2490 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2491 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2492 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2493 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2494 identical to None.
2495
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002496- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2497 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2498 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2499 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2500 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2501 results now.
2502
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002503- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2504 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2505
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002506- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2507 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2508 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2509 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2510 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2511 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2512 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2513 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2514
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002515- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2516
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002517- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2518 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2519
2520- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2521 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2522 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2523 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2524 and other systems.
2525
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002526- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2527 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2528 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2529 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 +00002530 work well with these.
2531
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002532- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2533
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002534- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002535 connections.
2536
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002537- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2538 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2539 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2540
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002541- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2542 sets
2543
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002544- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2545 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2546 name.
2547
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002548- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2549 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2550 passed in.
2551
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002552- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002553 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002554 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2555 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002556
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002557- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2558
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002559- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2560
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002561- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2562 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2563 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2564
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002565- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2566 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2567 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2568 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002569 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002570
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002571- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002572 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002573 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002574
2575- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2576 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2577 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2578
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002579- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002580 the value of its expression argument.
2581
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002582- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2583 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2584 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2585
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002586- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2587 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2588 skipstone browser was included.
2589
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002590- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2591 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2592
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002593Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002594-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002595
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002596- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2597 names in addition to accepting file names.
2598
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002599- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2600 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2601 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2602 still used and useful.)
2603
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002604- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2605 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2606 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2607 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002608
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002609- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2610 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2611 the generated binary.
2612
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002613Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002614-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002615
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002616- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2617
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002618- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2619 except in the hands of experts.
2620
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002621- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002622 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2623 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2624 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002625
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002626- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2627 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2628 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2629 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2630 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2631 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2632 builds.
2633
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002634- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2635 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2636 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2637 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2638 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2639 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2640 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2641 new type.
2642
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002643- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002644
2645 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2646 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2647 positive infinities.
2648
2649 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2650 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2651 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2652 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2653 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2654 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2655 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2656
2657 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2658
2659 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2660
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002661- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2662 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2663 size of the executable.
2664
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002665- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2666 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2667 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2668 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002669
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002670- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2671
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002672- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2673 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2674 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002675
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002676- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2677 well as Unix.
2678
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002679- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2680 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2681 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2682 modules in the README file for details.
2683
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002684C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002685-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002686
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002687- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2688 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002689 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002690 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002691 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002692
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002693- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2694 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2695 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2696 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2697 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2698 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002699 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002700 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2701 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2702 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2703 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2704 aligned.)
2705
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002706- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2707 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2708 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2709
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002710- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2711 level.
2712
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002713- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2714 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2715 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2716 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2717 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2718
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002719- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2720 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2721 code.
2722
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002723- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2724 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2725 adjusting for negative indices.
2726
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002727- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2728 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2729 object.
2730
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002731- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2732 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2733 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2734
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002735- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2736 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002737
2738- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2739
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002740- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2741 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2742 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2743 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2744
2745- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2746
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002747- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002748
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002749- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002750 without going through the buffer API.
2751
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002752- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002753
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002754- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2755 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2756 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2757 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2758
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002759- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2760 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2761
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002762- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002763 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2764
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002765New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002766-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002767
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002768- OpenVMS is now supported.
2769
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002770- AtheOS is now supported.
2771
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002772- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2773
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002774- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2775
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002776Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002777-----
2778
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002779- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2780 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2781 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002782
2783Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002784-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002785
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002786- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2787 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2788 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2789 bugs.
2790 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002791 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002792 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2793 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002794 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002795
2796- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002797 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002798
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002799- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2800 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2801
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002802- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2803 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002804 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002805 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2806
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002807- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2808 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2809 use files" uninstall option).
2810
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002811- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2812
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002813- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2814 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2815
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002816- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2817 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2818 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2819
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002820- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2821 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2822 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2823 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2824 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002825 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2826 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2827 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002828
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002829- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002830 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002831 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2832 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2833 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2834 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2835 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2836 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2837 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2838 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2839 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2840 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2841 work around.
2842
2843- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2844 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2845 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2846 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2847 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2848 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2849 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2850 specified with O_CREAT too).
2851
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002852Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002853----
2854
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002855- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002856
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002857- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2858 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2859 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2860
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002861- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2862 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2863 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2864
2865- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2866 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2867 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2868 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2869 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2870 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2871 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2872 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002873
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002874- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2875 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2876 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002877
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002878- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2879 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2880 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2881 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2882 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002883
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002884- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2885 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2886 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002887
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002888- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2889 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002890
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002891- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2892 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2893 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2894 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2895 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002896
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002897- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2898 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2899 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2900
2901- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2902 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2903 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002904
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002905- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2906 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2907 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2908 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002909 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002910
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002911- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2912 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002913
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002914- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2915 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002916
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002917- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002918 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002919 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2920 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002921
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002922
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002923What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002924===============================
2925
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002926*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2927
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002928Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002929--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002930
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002931- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2932 with a custom metaclass.
2933
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002934Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002935-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002936
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002937- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2938 are proxies.
2939
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002940Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002941-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002942
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002943- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2944 very short strings.
2945
2946- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2947 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2948 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2949 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2950 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2951
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002952Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002953-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002954
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002955- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2956 close or delete time).
2957
2958- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2959 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2960
2961- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2962
2963- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002964 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002965
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002966Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002967-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002968
2969Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002970-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002971
2972C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002974
2975New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002976-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002977
2978Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002979-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002980
2981Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002982-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002983
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002984- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2985
2986- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2987 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2988
2989- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2990 deleted at process exit time.
2991
2992- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2993 in backslash.
2994
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002995Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002996----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002997
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002998- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2999 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3000 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3001
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003002
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003003What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003004===========================
3005
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003006*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3007
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003008Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003009--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003010
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003011- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3012 been extensively updated. See
3013
3014 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3015
3016 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3017
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003018- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3019 deleted!
3020
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003021- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3022 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3023 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3024 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3025 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3026
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003027- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3028
3029 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3030 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3031
3032 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3033 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3034 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3035 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3036 supported anyway.
3037
3038 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3039 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3040
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003041- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3042 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3043 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3044 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3045 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003046
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003047- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3048 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3049 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3050
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003051Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003052-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003053
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003054- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3055 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3056 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3057 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3058 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3059 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003060 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3061 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3062 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3063 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003064
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003065- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3066 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3067 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3068
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003069Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003070-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003071
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003072- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3073
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003074Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003075-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003076
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003077- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3078 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3079 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3080 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3081 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3082 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3083
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003084- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3085
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003086- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3087
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003088- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3089
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003090- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3091 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3092 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3093
3094- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3095
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003096Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003097-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003098
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003099- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3100 off a search on Google.
3101
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003102Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003103-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003104
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003105- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3106 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3107 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3108 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3109 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3110 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3111 other platforms should do likewise.
3112
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003113- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3114 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3115 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3116
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003117C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003118-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003119
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003120- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3121 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3122 producing key-value pairs.
3123
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003124- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003125 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003126 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3127 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3128 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3129 previously went unchallenged.
3130
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003131New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003132-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003133
3134Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003135-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003136
3137Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003139
3140Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003141----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003142
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003143- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3144 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003145
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003146- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3147 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3148 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3149 home.
3150
3151
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003152What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003153===========================
3154
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003155*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3156
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003157Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003158--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003159
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003160- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3161 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003162
3163 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003164 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003165
3166 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3167 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003168 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003169 This needs to be documented.
3170
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003171- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3172 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3173
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003174- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3175 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3176 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3177
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003178- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3179 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3180
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003181- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3182 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3183 class forbids it).
3184
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003185- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3186 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3187 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3188
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003189- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3190
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003191Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003192-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003193
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003194- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3195 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003196 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003197
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003198- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3199 (like 1 + '').
3200
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003201Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003202-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003203
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003204- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3205 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3206 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3207 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003208 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003209 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3210
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003211- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3212 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3213 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3214 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3215
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003216- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3217 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003218 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3219 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3220 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003221
3222- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3223 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003224
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003225- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3226 bytes on its input.
3227
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003228Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003230
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003231- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003232 convenience function.
3233
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003234- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3235 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3236 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003237 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3238 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3239 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3240 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3241 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3242 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003243
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003244- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3245 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3246 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3247 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3248
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003249- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3250 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3251 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3252
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003253- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3254 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3255 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3256 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3257
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003258- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3259 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003260 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003261 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3262 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3263 new -l and -e options.
3264
3265- statcache is now deprecated.
3266
3267- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3268 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003269 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003270 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3271 time properly taken into account.
3272
3273- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3274 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3275 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3276 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3277
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003278Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003280
3281Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003282-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003283
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003284- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3285 is built with libdb3 if available.
3286
3287- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3288
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003289C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003290-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003291
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003292- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3293 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3294 PySequence_Size().
3295
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003296- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3297
3298- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3299 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3300 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3301
3302- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3303 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3304
3305- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3306 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3307
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003308New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003309-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003310
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003311- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3312 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3313
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003314- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3315 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3316
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003317- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3318
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003319Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003320-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003321
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003322- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3323 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3324
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003325Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003327
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003328Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003329----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003330
3331- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3332 removed completely in the next release.
3333
3334- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3335 OSX.
3336
3337- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3338 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3339
3340- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3341
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003342
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003343What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003344===========================
3345
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3347
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003348Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003349--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003350
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003351- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003352 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003353 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003354 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3355 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003356 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3357 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003358 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3359 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003360
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003361- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3362 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3363
3364- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3365 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3366
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003367Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003368-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003369
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003370- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3371 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3372 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3373 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3374 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3375 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3376 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3377 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3378
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003379- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3380 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3381 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3382 example).
3383
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003384- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003385 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003386 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003387 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003388
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003389- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3390 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3391 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003392 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003393
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003394- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3395 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3396 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3397 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3398 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3399 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3400
3401 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3402
3403 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3404
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003405Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003407
3408- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3409
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003410- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3411
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003412- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3413 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003414
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003415- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3416 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3417 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3418 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3419 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3420 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003421 attributes.
3422
3423- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3424 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3425 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003426
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003427- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3428 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3429 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003430
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003431- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3432 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3433 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003434 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3435 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3436
3437- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3438 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003439
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003440Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003441-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003442
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003443- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3444 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3445
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003446- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3447 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3448 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3449 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3450
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003451- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3452 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3453 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3454 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3455
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003456 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3457 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3458 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3459 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3460 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3461 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3462 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3463 without losing information).
3464
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003465- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003466 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3467 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3468 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3469 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3470 module).
3471
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003472 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003473 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3474 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3475 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3476 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003477
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003478- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003479 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3480 encoding.
3481
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003482- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3483 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3484
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003485- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003486 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3487
3488- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3489 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3490 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3491 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3492
3493- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3494
3495- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3496 ON, and OFF.
3497
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003498- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3499 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3500
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003501Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003502-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003503
3504- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3505 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3506 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003507
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003508- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3509 been added: -X and -E.
3510
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003511Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003512-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003513
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003514- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3515 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3516
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003517C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003518-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003519
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003520- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3521 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3522 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3523 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3524 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3525
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003526- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3527 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3528 as long) arguments.
3529
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003530- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3531 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3532 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3533 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3534 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3535 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3536
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003537- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3538 input.
3539
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003540New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003542
3543Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003545
3546Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003547-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003548
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003549- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3550 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3551 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3552
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003553- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3554 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3555 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003556 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003557
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3559 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3560 import signal
3561 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003562
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003563 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003564 while 1:
3565 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003566 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003567 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3568 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3569 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3570 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003571
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003572
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003573What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3574===========================
3575
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003576*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3577
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003578Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003580
3581- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3582 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3583 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3584
3585- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3586 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3587 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3588 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3589 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3590 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3591 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003592
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003593- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003594 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003595 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3596 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3597 associate a docstring with a property.
3598
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003599- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3600 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3601 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3602 other built-in object types.
3603
3604- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3605 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3606 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3607 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3608 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3609
3610- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3611 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3612
3613- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3614 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003615 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003616 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3617 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3618 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3619 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3620 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3621
3622- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3623 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3624 class.
3625
3626- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3627 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3628 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3629 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3630
3631- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3632 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3633 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3634 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3635
3636- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3637 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3638
3639- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3640 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3641 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3642 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3643 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003644 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003645 with the same value as s.
3646
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003647- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3648
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003649Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003650----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003651
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003652- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3653
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003654- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3655 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3656 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3657 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3658 objects.
3659
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003660- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3661 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003662 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3663 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3664
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003665- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3666 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3667 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3668
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003669Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003670-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003671
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003672- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3673 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3674 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3675 by the instances.
3676
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003677- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3678 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3679 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3680
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003681- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3682 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3683 before the entire comparison is complete.
3684
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003685- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3686 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3687 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3688
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003689- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3690 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3691 getwriter().
3692
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003693- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3694 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3695
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003696- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003697 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3698 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3699
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003700- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3701 iterable object.
3702
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003703- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3704 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003705
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003706- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3707 authentication.
3708
3709- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3710 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003711
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003712- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003713 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3714 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3715 a sample driver.)
3716
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003717Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003719
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003720- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3721 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3722 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3723 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3724 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3725 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3726 kernel has large file support.
3727
3728- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3729 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3730 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3731 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3732 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3733
3734- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3735 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3736 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3737
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003738C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003739-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003740
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003741- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3742 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3743
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003744New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003745-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003746
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003747- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3748 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3749
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003750Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003751-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003752
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003753- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3754 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3755 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3756 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3757 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3758
3759- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3760 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3761 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3762 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3763
3764- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3765 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3766
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003767Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003768-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003769
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003770- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003771 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3772 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003773
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003774
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003775What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3776===========================
3777
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003778*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3779
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003780Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003781----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003782
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003783- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3784 big to represent as a C double.
3785
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003786- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3787 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3788 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3789 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3790 restriction).
3791
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003792- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3793 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3794 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3795 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3796 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3797
3798 >>> dir([])
3799 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3800 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3801 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3802 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3803 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3804 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3805 'reverse', 'sort']
3806
3807 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3808
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003809- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003810 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3811 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3812 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3813 OverflowError exception.
3814
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003815- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003816 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003817 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3818 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3819 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3820 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3821 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003822 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003823 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3824 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3825
3826 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3827 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3828 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3829 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003830
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003831- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003832 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3833 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3834 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3835 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3836 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3837 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3838 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3839 once it is created.
3840
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003841- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3842 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3843 (key, value) pairs.
3844
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003845- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003846 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3847 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3848
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003849- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3850 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3851 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3852 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3853 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003854
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003855- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003856 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3857 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3858
3859 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3860
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003861- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003862 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3863
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003864Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003865-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003866
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003867- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003868 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3869 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003870
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003871- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3872 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3873 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3874 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3875 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3876 in this area anymore).
3877
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003878- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3879 threading.Timer.
3880
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003881- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3882 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3883
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003884- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003885 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3886
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003887- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003888 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3889 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3890 converted to Python longs.
3891
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003892- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003893 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3894
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003895- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3896 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3897 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3898
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003899Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003901
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003902- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3903 division operators as per PEP 238.
3904
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003905Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003907
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003908- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3909 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3910 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3911 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3912
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003913C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003915
3916- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003917
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003918- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3919 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003920 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003921
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3923 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003924 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003926
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003927- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003928 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3929 module:
3930
3931 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003932
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003933 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3934 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003935
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003936 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3937 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003938
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003939 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3940
3941 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3942
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003943- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003944 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3945 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3946 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003947
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003948New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003949-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003950
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003951- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3952 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3953 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3954 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3955 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003956
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003957Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003959
3960Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003962
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003963- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3964 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3965 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3966 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003967 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3968 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3969 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3970 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3971 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003972
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003973- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003974 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3975
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003976
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003977What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3978===========================
3979
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003980*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3981
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003982Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003983-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003984
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003985- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3986 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3987
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003988- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3989 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3990 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003991
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003992- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3993 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3994 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3995 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003996
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003997- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3998
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003999- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004000
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004001Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004003
4004- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004005 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004006 the module docstring for details.
4007
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004008Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004010
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004011- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004012 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4013 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4014 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004015
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004016- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4017 Nick Mathewson.
4018
4019Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004021
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004022- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4023 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4024 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4025 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4026 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4027 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4028 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4029 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4030
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004031- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4032 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4033 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4034 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4035
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004036- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4037 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4038 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4039 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4040 come a long way).
4041
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004042- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4043 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4044 write filters for these warnings).
4045
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004046- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4047 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4048 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4049 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4050 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4051
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004052- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4053 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4054 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4055 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4056 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4057 older distribution.
4058
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004059Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004060-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004061
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004062- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4063 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004064 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004065
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004066- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4067 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4068 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4069
4070- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4071
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004072- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4073
4074- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4075
4076- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4077
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004079
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004080- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4081
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004082New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004084
4085C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004087
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004088- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4089 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4090 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4091 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4092 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4093 against buffer overruns.
4094
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004095- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004096 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4097 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004098 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4099 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4100 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4101
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004102- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4103 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4104 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4105 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4106 deprecated.
4107
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004108Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004110
4111- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4112 relevant is found.
4113
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004114
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004115What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004116===========================
4117
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4119
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004120Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004121----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004122
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004123- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4124 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4125 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4126 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4127 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4128 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4129 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4130 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004131 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004132 repaired.
4133
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004134- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004135 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004136 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4137 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4138 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4139 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4140 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4141 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4142 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4143 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4144
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004145- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4146 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4147 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4148 leading BMO character).
4149
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004150- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4151 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4152 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4153
4154 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4155 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4156 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004157
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004158 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4159 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4160 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4161 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4162 for various simple to use conversions.
4163
4164 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4165 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4166
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4168 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4169 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4170 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4171 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4172 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4173 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4174 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4175 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4176 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4177 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4178 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4179 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4180 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4181 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004182
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004183- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4184 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4185 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004186 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004187 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004188
4189 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004190 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4191 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4192 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4193 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4194 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004195 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4196 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004197
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004198 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4199 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4200 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004201 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004202
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004203- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4204 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4205 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4206 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4207 floating arithmetic,
4208
4209 x = 9007199254740992.0
4210 print long(x)
4211
4212 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4213 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4214 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4215 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4216 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4217 functions are of good quality).
4218
4219 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4220 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4221 algorithms to break.
4222
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004223- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4224 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4225 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4226 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4227 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4228 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4229 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4230 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4231 order.
4232
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004233- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4234 operation along the most common code paths.
4235
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004236- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4237 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4238
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004239- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4240 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4241 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4242 {}.update(UserDict())
4243
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004244- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4245 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4246 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4247 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4248 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4249 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4250 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4251 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4252
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004253- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004254 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004255
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004256 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004257 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4258 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004259 join() method of strings
4260 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004261 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4262 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004264 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004265
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004266- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4267 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4268
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004269- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4270 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4271
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004272- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4273 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4274 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4275 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4276
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004277- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4278 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004279 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004280 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4281 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004282
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004283- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4284
4285
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004286Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004287-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004288
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004289- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004290 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004291 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4292 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4293
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004294- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4295 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4296
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004297- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4298 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4299 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4300 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4301
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004302- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4303 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4304 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4305
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004306- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4307
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004308- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4309
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004310- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4311 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4312 that are still imported into string.py).
4313
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004314- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4315
4316- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4317 Now it does.
4318
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004319- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4320
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004321- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4322 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4323 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4324 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4325 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004326 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4327 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004328
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004329- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4330 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4331 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4332 'help(object)'.
4333
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004334Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004335-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004336
4337- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004338 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004339 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4340 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4341
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004342- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004343 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4344 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004345
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004346C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004348
4349- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4350 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351
4352----
4353
4354**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**