blob: 7831f847a69fc59bae9e83ab047052e5b036a586 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-XXXX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15...
16
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
20...
21
22Library
23-------
24
25...
26
27Build
28-----
29
30...
31
32C API
33-----
34
35...
36
37Documentation
38-------------
39
40...
41
42Tests
43-----
44
45...
46
47Windows
48-------
49
50...
51
52Mac
53---
54
55...
56
57New platforms
58-------------
59
60...
61
62Tools/Demos
63-----------
64
65...
66
67
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000068What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
69================================
70
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +000071*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000072
73Core and builtins
74-----------------
75
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +000076- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
77 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
78
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +000079- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
80 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
81 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
82 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
83
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000084- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
85 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
86
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000087- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
88 constant.
89
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000090- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
91 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
92 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
93 large), and to anomalies such as
94 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
95 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
96 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
97 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000098
99Extension modules
100-----------------
101
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000102- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
103 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000104 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
105 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
106 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000107
108Library
109-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000110
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000111- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
112 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
113 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
114 --swig-cpp.
115
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000116- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
117 it is set.
118
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000119- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000120
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000121- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
122 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
123 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
124 Closes bug #1039270.
125
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000126- Updates for the email package:
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000127 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000128 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
129 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
130 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
131 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
132 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
133 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
134 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
135 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
136 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
137 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
138 + Updates to documentation.
139
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000140- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
141 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
142 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
143 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
144
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000145- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000146
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000147- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
148 applications should use the getmember function.
149
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000150- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
151
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000152- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
153 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
154 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
155 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
156 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
157 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
158 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
159 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
160 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
161
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000162- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
163 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000164 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000165
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000166- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
167 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
168 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
169 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
170 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
171 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
172 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
173 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000174
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000175- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
176 the new public features (of which there are many).
177
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000178- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000179 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
180 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
181 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
182 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000183 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000184
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000185- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
186
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000187- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
188 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
189 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
190 options.
191
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000192- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
193 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
194 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
195 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
196 conditions under which non-string values work.
197
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000198Build
199-----
200
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000201- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
202 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
203 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
204
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000205- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
206 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
207 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
208 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
209 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000210
211C API
212-----
213
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000214- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
215 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
216
217- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
218
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000219- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
220 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
221 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
222 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
223 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
224 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
225 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
226 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
227 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
228
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000229- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
230
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000231- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
232 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
233 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000234
235Documentation
236-------------
237
238...
239
240Tests
241-----
242
243- test__locale ported to unittest
244
245Windows
246-------
247
248...
249
250Mac
251---
252
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000253- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
254 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
255 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000256
257New platforms
258-------------
259
260...
261
262Tools/Demos
263-----------
264
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000265- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
266 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
267 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
268 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
269 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000270
271
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000272What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
273=================================
274
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000275*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000276
277Core and builtins
278-----------------
279
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000280- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000281 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
282
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000283- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
284 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
285 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
286 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
287 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
288 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
289 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
290 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000291 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
292 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
293 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
294 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
295 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000296
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000297- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
298 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
299 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
300 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
301 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
302
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000303- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
304
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000305- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
306 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
307
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000308- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
309 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
310 modified the list.
311
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000312- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
313 functions is now writable.
314
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000315- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
316 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
317 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
318 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
319
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000320- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
321 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
322 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
323 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
324 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000325
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000326- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
327 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
328
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000329Extension modules
330-----------------
331
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000332- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
333
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000334- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
335 data.
336
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000337- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
338 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
339 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
340 supposed to have been truncated away.
341
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000342- Added socket.socketpair().
343
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000344- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
345 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
346
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000347- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000348 versions of Python, have now been removed.
349
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000350Library
351-------
352
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000353- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000354 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000355
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000356- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
357 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
358
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000359- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
360 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
361
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000362- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
363
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000364- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
365 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000366
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000367- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
368 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
369
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000370- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
371
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000372- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
373
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000374- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
375
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000376- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
377 Percivall.
378
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000379- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
380 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
381
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000382- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
383 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
384 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000385 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000386
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000387- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
388 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
389 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
390 and exponent.
391
392- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
393
394- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
395 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
396 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
397
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000398- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
399 to the readline module.
400
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000401- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000402 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
403 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000404
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000405- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
406 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
407 contains symlinks.
408
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000409- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
410 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
411
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000412- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
413 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
414 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
415
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000416- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
417 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
418 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
419 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
420 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
421 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
422 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
423 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
424 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
425 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
426 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
427 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
428 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
429
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000430- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
431
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000432Tools/Demos
433-----------
434
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000435- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
436 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
437
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000438- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
439
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000440Build
441-----
442
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000443- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
444 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
445 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
446 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
447 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
448 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
449 plans to do so.
450
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000451- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
452 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
453
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000454- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
455 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
456
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000457- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
458 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
459
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000460- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
461 GNU/k*BSD systems.
462
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000463- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
464 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
465
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000466C API
467-----
468
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000469..
470
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000471Documentation
472-------------
473
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000474- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
475 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
476
477- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
478 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
479 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000480
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000481New platforms
482-------------
483
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000484- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
485
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000486Tests
487-----
488
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000489..
490
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000491Windows
492-------
493
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000494- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
495 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
496 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
497 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
498 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
499 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
500 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
501 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
502 the problem.
503
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000504Mac
505---
506
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000507..
508
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000509
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000510What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
511=================================
512
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000513*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000514
515Core and builtins
516-----------------
517
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000518- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
519 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
520 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
521 sensitive code.
522
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000523- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000524 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000525
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000526 @staticmethod
527 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000528
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000529 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000530
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000531- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
532 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
533 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
534 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
535 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
536 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
537 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
538 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
539 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
540 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
541 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
542
543 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
544 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
545 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
546 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
547 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
548 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
549 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
550
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000551- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
552 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
553
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000554- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000555 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000556
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000557- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000558 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000559 which was missing for no apparent reason.
560
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000561- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000562 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
563 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
564
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000565- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
566 types that support garbage collection.
567
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000568- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
569
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000570- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
571 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
572 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
573 Jython.
574
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000575- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
576
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000577- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
578 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
579
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000580- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
581 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
582 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000583
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000584- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
585 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
586 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
587
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000588Extension modules
589-----------------
590
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000591- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
592
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000593Library
594-------
595
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000596- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
597 TIS-620
598
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000599- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
600 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
601 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
602 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
603 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
604 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
605 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
606 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
607 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
608 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
609
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000610- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
611
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000612- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
613 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
614 same as when the argument is omitted).
615 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
616
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000617- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
618
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000619- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
620 schemes are offered.
621
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000622- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
623
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000624- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
625 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
626 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
627
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000628- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
629
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000630- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
631 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
632
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000633- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
634 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
635 when dummy_threading is being used.
636
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000637- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
638 from a tarfile.
639
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000640- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000641 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000642
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000643- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
644 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
645 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
646 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
647
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000648- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
649 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
650
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000651- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
652 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
653 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
654 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
655 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
656 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
657 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
658 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
659 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
660 by some other method in progress).
661
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000662- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
663 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
664 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000665
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000666- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
667
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000668- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
669 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
670 AM Kuchling.
671
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000672- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
673 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
674 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
675
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000676- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
677 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
678 instead of unsigned.
679
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000680- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000681 no longer part of the public API.
682
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000683- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
684 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
685 string methods of the same name).
686
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000687- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000688 SF patch 945642.
689
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000690- doctest unittest integration improvements:
691
692 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
693
694 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
695 DocTestSuites.
696
697- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
698 that provide thread-local data.
699
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000700- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
701 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
702
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000703- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
704
705- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
706 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
707 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
708
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000709- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
710
711 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
712 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
713 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000714
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000715 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
716 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
717 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
718 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
719
720 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
721 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
722
723 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
724 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
725 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
726 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
727
728 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
729 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
730 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
731 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
732 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
733
734 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
735 wrapping help output.
736
737 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
738 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
739 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000740
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000741C API
742-----
743
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000744- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
745 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
746 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
747 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
748 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
749 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
750 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
751 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
752 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
753 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
754 its visible semantics have not changed.
755
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000756- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
757 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
758
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000759Documentation
760-------------
761
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000762- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000763
764 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000765 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000766
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000767 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000768
769 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
770
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000771- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000772
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000773Tests
774-----
775
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000776- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000777 platforms that use the Makefile.
778
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000779- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
780 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
781 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
782
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000783
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000784What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
785=================================
786
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000787*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000788
789Core and builtins
790-----------------
791
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000792- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
793 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
794 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
795 objects now (one object instead of three).
796
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000797- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
798 Windows DLLs.
799
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000800- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
801 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000802
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000803- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
804 a new .pyc magic.
805
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000806- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
807 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
808 be there.
809
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000810- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
811 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
812 the LC_NUMERIC category.
813
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000814- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
815 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
816 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
817
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000818- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
819
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000820- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
821 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
822 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000823
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000824- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
825 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
826
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000827- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
828
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000829- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000830 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000831
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000832- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
833
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000834- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
835
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000836- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
837 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
838
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000839- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
840 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
841 Fixes bug #858016 .
842
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000843- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
844 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
845 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
846
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000847- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
848 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
849 improves their performance (about 35%).
850
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000851- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
852 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
853 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
854
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000855- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
856 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
857 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
858 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
859
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000860- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
861 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
862 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
863 length is not known).
864
865- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
866 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000867 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
868 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000869 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
870
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000871- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
872 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
873
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000874- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
875 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
876 keyword arguments.
877
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000878- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
879 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
880 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
881
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000882- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
883 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
884 cases.
885
886- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
887 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
888 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
889 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
890 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
891 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
892 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
893 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
894 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
895 a release build.
896
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000897- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
898 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
899
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000900- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000901 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000902
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000903- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
904 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
905 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
906 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
907 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
908 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
909 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
910 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
911 destroyed.
912
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000913- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
914 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
915 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
916 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
917 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
918 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
919 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
920 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
921
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000922- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
923 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
924 character other than a space.
925
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000926- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
927 by the function object or by the method object, the function
928 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
929 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
930 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
931 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
932 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
933 attributes with the same name.
934
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000935- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
936 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
937 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
938 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
939 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
940 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
941 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
942 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
943 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
944 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
945 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
946 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
947 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
948 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000949
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000950- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
951 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
952 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
953 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
954 This has been repaired.
955
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000956- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
957
958- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
959
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000960- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
961 over a sequence.
962
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000963- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000964 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000965
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000966- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
967
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000968- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
969 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
970 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
971 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
972 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
973 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
974 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
975 records with equal keys is unchanged).
976
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000977- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
978 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
979 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
980
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000981- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
982 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
983 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
984 freelist.
985
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000986- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
987 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
988
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000989- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
990 number.
991
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000992- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
993 a TypeError exception.
994
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000995- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
996 820195.
997
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000998- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
999 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1000 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1001
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001002- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001003 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1004 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001005
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001006- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1007 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1008 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1009
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001010- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1011 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001012 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001013
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001014- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001015 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1016 the first call.
1017
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001018
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001019Extension modules
1020-----------------
1021
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001022- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1023 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1024
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001025- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1026 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1027 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1028 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1029 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1030 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1031 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001032
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001033- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1034
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001035- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1036
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001037- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1038 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1039
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001040- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1041 fewer false positives.
1042
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001043- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1044 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1045
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001046- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001047 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1048
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001049- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001050 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001051 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001052 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1053 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001054
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001055- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1056 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1057 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1058 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1059
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001060- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1061 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1062 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1063 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1064 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1065 #897625.
1066
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001067- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1068 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1069
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001070- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1071 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1072 and pops on either side of the deque.
1073
1074- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1075 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1076
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001077- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1078 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1079 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1080 other functions that expect a function argument.
1081
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001082- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1083
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001084- os.getsid was added.
1085
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001086- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1087 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1088 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1089
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001090- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1091
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001092- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1093
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001094- readline.clear_history was added.
1095
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001096- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1097
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001098- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1099
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001100- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1101
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001102- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1103
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001104- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1105
1106- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1107
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001108- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1109
1110- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1111
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001112- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1113 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1114 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1115
1116- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1117 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1118 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1119 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1120 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1121 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1122 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1123
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001124- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1125 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1126 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1127 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001128
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001129- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001130 iterators from a single iterable.
1131
1132- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1133 of raising a TypeError exception.
1134
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001135- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1136 as parameter.
1137
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001138Library
1139-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001140
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001141- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1142 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1143 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001144
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001145- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1146 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1147 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001148
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001149- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001150
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001151- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1152 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001153
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001154- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1155 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1156
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001157- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1158
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001159- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001160 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001161
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001162- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001163 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001164
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001165- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1166
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001167- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1168 on cygwin and mingw32.
1169
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001170- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1171
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001172- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1173 module.
1174
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001175- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1176 installation scheme for all platforms.
1177
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001178- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001179 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001180
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001181- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1182 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1183 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1184
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001185- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1186 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1187 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1188
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001189- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1190
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001191- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1192
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001193- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1194 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1195
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001196- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1197 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1198 type pattern with the same value exists.
1199
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001200- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1201 when run from the command prompt).
1202
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001203- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1204 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1205
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001206- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1207 default sort).
1208
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001209- Added global runctx function to profile module
1210
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001211- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1212
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001213- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1214
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001215- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1216
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001217- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001218 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1219 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1220 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1221 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1222 accordingly.
1223
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001224- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1225 decoding standards.
1226
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001227- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1228 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1229 called for all requests.
1230
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001231- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1232 they are passed to the compiler.
1233
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001234- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1235 indent, width and depth.
1236
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001237- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1238 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1239
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001240- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1241 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1242
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001243- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1244
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001245- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1246
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001247- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1248
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001249- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1250 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1251
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001252- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001253 for better performance.
1254
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001255- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001256
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001257- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1258 a string).
1259
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001260- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1261
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001262- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1263
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001264- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1265
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001266- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1267
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001268- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1269 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1270 list of fieldnames.
1271
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001272- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1273 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1274
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001275- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1276
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001277- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1278 empty lists.
1279
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001280- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1281 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1282 and shelves.
1283
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001284- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1285 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1286
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001287- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001288 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1289 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001290
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001291- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1292 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001293 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001294
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001295- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001296 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1297 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1298
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001299- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1300 and removed in Py2.4.
1301
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001302- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1303
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001304- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1305
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001306Tools/Demos
1307-----------
1308
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001309- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1310 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1311
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001312- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1313
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001314- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1315 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1316 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1317 destination in situations where both files are given.
1318
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001319- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1320 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1321 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1322 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1323
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001324- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1325
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001326- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1327 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1328 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1329 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1330 now.
1331
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001332- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1333 in effect
1334
1335- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1336 C-c C-h
1337
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001338- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1339 -d option was given.
1340
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001341Build
1342-----
1343
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001344- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1345 build under OS X.
1346
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001347- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1348 --enable-profiling.
1349
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001350- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1351 is configured --with-tsc.
1352
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001353- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1354 on AMD64.
1355
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001356- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1357 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1358
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001359- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1360 removed.
1361
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001362- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1363 supported (see PEP 11).
1364
1365- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1366
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001367- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1368
1369- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1370 (see PEP 11).
1371
1372- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1373 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1374
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001375C API
1376-----
1377
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001378- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1379 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1380 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1381
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001382- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1383 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1384 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1385 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1386
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001387- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1388 generator objects.
1389
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001390- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1391 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001392 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1393 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001394
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001395- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1396 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1397
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001398- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1399 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1400 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1401 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1402 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1403
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001404- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1405 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1406 about 10% faster.
1407
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001408- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1409 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1410
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001411- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1412 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1413 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1414 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1415
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001416Windows
1417-------
1418
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001419- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1420 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1421 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1422 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1423
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001424- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1425 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1426 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1427
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001428
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001429What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1430===============================
1431
1432*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1433
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001434IDLE
1435----
1436
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001437- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1438 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1439 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1440 context-menu actions.
1441
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001442- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1443 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1444 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1445 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1446 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1447 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1448 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1449 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1450 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1451
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001452
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001453What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1454=============================================
1455
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001456*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001457
1458Core and builtins
1459-----------------
1460
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001461- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001462 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001463 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1464
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001465Extension modules
1466-----------------
1467
1468- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1469 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1470 than once. This has been fixed.
1471
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001472- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1473 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1474 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1475 call.
1476
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001477- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1478
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001479Library
1480-------
1481
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001482- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1483 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1484
1485- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1486 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1487 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1488 restored.
1489
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001490IDLE
1491----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001492
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001493- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001494
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001495Build
1496-----
1497
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001498- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1499 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1500
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001501C API
1502-----
1503
1504Windows
1505-------
1506
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001507- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1508 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1509
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001510- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1511
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001512Mac
1513---
1514
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001515- Various fixes to pimp.
1516
1517- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1518
1519- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1520 more problems than it solves.
1521
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001522
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001523What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1524=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001525
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001526*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1527
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001528Core and builtins
1529-----------------
1530
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001531- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1532 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1533
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001534- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1535 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001536 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001537
1538- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1539 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1540 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001541 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001542
1543- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1544 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001545
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001546- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1547 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1548 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1549
1550- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001551 770247.
1552
1553- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001554
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001555Extension modules
1556-----------------
1557
1558- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1559 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1560
1561- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1562
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001563- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1564
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001565- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1566 contained within the _strptime module.
1567
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001568- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1569 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1570
1571- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001572 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1573
1574- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1575 the find_class attribute, if present.
1576
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001577- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001578
1579 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1580 (SF bug 763298).
1581
1582 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001583 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1584 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1585 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001586
1587 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1588
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001589Library
1590-------
1591
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001592- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1593
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001594- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1595 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1596 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1597 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1598 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1599 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1600 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1601 or Tester().
1602
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001603- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1604 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1605 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1606 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1607 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1608 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1609 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1610 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1611 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001612
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001613 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001614
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001615- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1616 weren't before was an oversight.
1617
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001618- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1619 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1620
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001621- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1622 when there are no lines.
1623
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001624- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1625 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1626
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001627- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1628 to child processes.
1629
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001630- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1631
1632- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1633
1634- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1635 xmlrpclib.
1636
1637- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1638 responses.
1639
1640- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1641 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1642
1643- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1644 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1645 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1646
1647- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1648 used as patterns.
1649
1650- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1651 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1652 than Tk 8.3.
1653
1654- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1655
1656- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001657
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001658Tools/Demos
1659-----------
1660
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001661- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1662
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001663- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1664
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001665- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001666
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001667Build
1668-----
1669
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001670- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1671
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001672- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1673
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001674- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1675 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001676
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001677- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1678 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1679 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001680
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001681C API
1682-----
1683
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001684- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1685 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1686
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001687Windows
1688-------
1689
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001690- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1691 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1692 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1693 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1694 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1695 Python exception ::
1696
1697 thread.error: can't start new thread
1698
1699 is raised now.
1700
1701- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1702 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1703 instead of from DLL teardown.
1704
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001705Mac
1706---
1707
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001708- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001709 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001710 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1711 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1712 the executable in the bundle.
1713
1714- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001715
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001716- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1717
1718- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1719 on Panther.
1720
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001721What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1722================================
1723
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001724*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001725
1726Core and builtins
1727-----------------
1728
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001729- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1730 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1731 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1732 with the -i option.
1733
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001734- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1735 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1736
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001737- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1738 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1739
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001740- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1741 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1742 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1743 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1744 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1745 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1746 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1747 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1748 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1749 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1750 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1751 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1752 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001753
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001754- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1755 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1756 embedded in a lambda expression.
1757
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001758- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1759 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1760 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1761 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1762 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1763
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001764- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1765 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1766 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1767
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001768- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1769 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1770
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001771- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1772 It's writable again.
1773
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001774- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1775 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1776 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001777 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001778
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001779- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1780 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1781 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1782
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001783Extension modules
1784-----------------
1785
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001786- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1787 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1788
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001789- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1790 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1791 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1792 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1793
1794- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1795 collection.
1796
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001797- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1798 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1799 unique within a single program run.
1800
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001801- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1802 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1803
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001804- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1805 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1806
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001807- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1808 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001809
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001810- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1811
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001812- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1813 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1814
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001815- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1816 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1817 for many BSD-derived systems.
1818
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001819
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001820Library
1821-------
1822
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001823- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1824 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1825 primary ones:
1826
1827 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1828 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1829 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1830
1831 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1832 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1833 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1834 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1835 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1836 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1837
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001838- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1839 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1840 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1841 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1842 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1843 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1844 argument.
1845
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001846- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1847 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1848 in the archive.
1849
1850- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1851 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1852
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001853- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1854 569574).
1855
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001856- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1857 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1858 no more.
1859
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001860- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1861 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1862 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1863 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1864 code coverage.
1865
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001866- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1867 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1868 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001869 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1870 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001871
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001872- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1873 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1874 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001875 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001876
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001877- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1878
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001879- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1880 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1881 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1882 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1883
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001884- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1885 handling.
1886
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001887- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1888 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1889
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001890- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1891 in socket.py.
1892
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001893- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1894
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001895- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1896 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1897 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1898 opener with proxy support.
1899
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001900- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1901
1902- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1903
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001904Tools/Demos
1905-----------
1906
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001907- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1908
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001909- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1910
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001911- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1912 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001913
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001914- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1915 files.
1916
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001917Build
1918-----
1919
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001920- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001921 different root directory.
1922
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001923C API
1924-----
1925
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001926- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1927 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1928 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1929 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1930 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1931 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1932 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1933 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1934 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1935 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1936
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001937- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1938 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1939 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1940 from Python.
1941
1942
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001943New platforms
1944-------------
1945
1946None this time.
1947
1948Tests
1949-----
1950
1951- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1952 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1953
1954Windows
1955-------
1956
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001957- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1958
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001959- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1960 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1961 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1962 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1963 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1964 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1965 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1966 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1967 that's what it's for.
1968
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001969Mac
1970---
1971
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001972- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1973 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1974 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1975 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001976- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1977 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1978- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001979
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001980SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1981------------------------------------
1982
1983430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1984598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1985622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1986661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1987683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1988697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1989713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1990724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1991727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1992729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1993730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1994731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1995732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1996733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1997735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1998740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1999744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2000745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2001747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2002749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2003751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2004753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2005755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2006757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2007760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2008
2009
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002010What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2011================================
2012
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002013*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002014
2015Core and builtins
2016-----------------
2017
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002018- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2019 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2020
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002021- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2022 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2023 and cannot be strings).
2024
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002025- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2026 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2027 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2028 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2029
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002030- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2031 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2032 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2033 Python itself.
2034
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002035- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2036 the referenced object, if it has one.
2037
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002038- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2039 the thread started at
2040 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2041
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002042- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2043 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2044 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2045 placed on a list index.
2046
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002047- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2048 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2049 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2050 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2051
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002052- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2053 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2054 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2055 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2056 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2057 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2058 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2059
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002060- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2061 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2062 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2063 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2064 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2065
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002066- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2067 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002068
2069- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2070 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2071 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2072 #693195.)
2073
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002074- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2075 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002076
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002077- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002078 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002079 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2080 interpreter executions, would fail.
2081
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002082- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002083 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002084 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002085
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002086Extension modules
2087-----------------
2088
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002089- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2090 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2091 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2092 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2093
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002094- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2095 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2096
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002097- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2098 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2099 and Greg Chapman.)
2100
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002101- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2102 recursively.
2103
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002104- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002105 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2106 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2107 leaks.
2108
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002109- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2110
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002111- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2112 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2113 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2114 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2115 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2116 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2117 #705836.
2118
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002119- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002120 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2121
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002122- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2123 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2124 See SF bug #692416.
2125
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002126- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2127 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2128
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002129- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2130 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2131 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002132
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002133- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002134 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2135 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2136
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002137- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2138 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2139 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2140 timeouts to work properly.
2141
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002142Library
2143-------
2144
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002145- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2146 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2147 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2148 future release.
2149
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002150- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2151 for querying platform dependent features.
2152
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002153- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002154
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002155- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2156 pickle protocol versions.
2157
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002158- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2159 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2160 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2161
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002162- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2163
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002164- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2165 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2166 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2167 modules.
2168
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002169- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2170 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2171 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2172
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002173- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2174 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2175
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002176- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2177 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2178 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2179
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002180- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002181 MS Office extensions.
2182
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002183- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2184 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2185
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002186- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2187 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2188
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002189- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2190 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2191 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2192 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2193 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2194 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2195
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002196- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2197 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2198 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002199
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002200- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2201 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2202 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2203
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002204- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2205
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002206- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2207 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2208 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2209
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002210Tools/Demos
2211-----------
2212
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002213- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2214 See the module docstring for details.
2215
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002216Build
2217-----
2218
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002219- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2220 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002221
2222C API
2223-----
2224
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002225- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2226
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002227- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2228 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2229 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2230
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002231- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2232 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002233
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002234 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2235 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2236 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002237
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002238- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002239 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2240
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002241- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2242 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2243 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002244
2245New platforms
2246-------------
2247
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002248None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002249
2250Tests
2251-----
2252
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002253- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2254 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002255
2256Windows
2257-------
2258
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002259- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2260 function.
2261
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002262- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2263 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002264
2265Mac
2266---
2267
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002268- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2269 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002270
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002271- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2272 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002273
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002274- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2275 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2276 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002277
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002278- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002279 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2280 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002281
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002282- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2283 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002284
2285
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002286What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2287=================================
2288
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002289*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002290
2291Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002292-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002293
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002294- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2295 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2296 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2297
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002298- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2299 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2300 (SF patch #664376.)
2301
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002302- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2303 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2304 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2305 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2306 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2307 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002308 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002309
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002310- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2311 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2312 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2313 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002314 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002315
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002316- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2317 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2318 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2319 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2320 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2321 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2322 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2323 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2324 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2325 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2326 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2327
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002328- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2329 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2330 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2331 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2332 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2333 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2334
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002335- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2336 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2337
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002338- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2339 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2340 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2341 case.)
2342
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002343- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2344 passed as unicode strings.
2345
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002346- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2347 See SF bug #683467.
2348
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002349- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2350 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2351
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002352- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2353
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002354- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2355
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002356- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2357 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2358 arguments.
2359
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002360- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2361 See SF bug #667147.
2362
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002363- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002364 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002365 See SF bug #676155.
2366
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002367- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002368 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002369 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2370 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2371 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2372 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2373 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2374 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002375
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002376Extension modules
2377-----------------
2378
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002379- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2380 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2381 tp_as_number pointer.
2382
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002383- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2384 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2385 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2386 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2387 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2388
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002389- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2390
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002391- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2392
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002393- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002394 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002395 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2396 patch #678531.)
2397
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002398- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2399 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2400
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002401- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2402 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2403
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002404- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2405
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002406- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2407 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2408 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2409
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002410- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2411
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002412- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2413 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2414
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002415- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002416
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002417- datetime changes:
2418
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002419 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2420
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002421 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2422 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2423 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2424 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2425 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2426 now.
2427
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002428 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002429 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2430 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002431
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002432 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002433 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002434 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2435 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2436 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2437 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002438
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002439 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2440 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2441 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002442 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2443
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002444 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2445 by a later example coded by Guido.
2446
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002447 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002448 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2449 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2450 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002451 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2452 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2453
2454 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2455 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2456 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2457 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2458 tzinfo subclass instance.
2459
2460 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2461 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2462 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2463 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2464 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2465 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2466 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2467 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002468
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002469 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2470 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2471 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2472 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2473 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002474 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2475
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002476 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002477
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002478 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2479 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2480 as a naive datetime object.
2481
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002482 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2483 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2484 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2485
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002486 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2487 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2488 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2489 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2490 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2491 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2492 comparison.
2493
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002494 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2495 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2496 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2497 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002498 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002499
2500 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002501
2502 and ::
2503
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002504 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2505
2506 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2507 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2508 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2509 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2510
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002511 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2512 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2513 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2514 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2515 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2516
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002517 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2518 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002519 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2520 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002521
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002522Library
2523-------
2524
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002525- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2526 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2527
2528- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2529 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2530 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2531 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2532 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2533 See PEP 307 for details.
2534
2535- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2536 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2537
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002538- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2539 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002540 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002541 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2542 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002543 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002544
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002545- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2546 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2547
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002548- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2549 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2550 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2551
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002552- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2553
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002554- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2555 exception.
2556
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002557- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2558 class.
2559
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002560- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2561 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2562 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2563
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002564- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2565 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2566
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002567- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002568 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2569 See SF bug #659228.
2570
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002571- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2572 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2573 See SF patch #651082.
2574
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002575- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002576
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002577- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2578 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2579
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002580- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002581 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002582
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002583- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2584 DOS paths from other platforms.
2585
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002586Tools/Demos
2587-----------
2588
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002589- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2590 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2591 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2592 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2593 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2594 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2595 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2596 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2597 example:
2598
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002599 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2600 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002601
2602 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2603
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002604
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002605Build
2606-----
2607
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002608- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2609 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2610 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002611 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2612
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002613 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2614
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002615- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2616 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2617 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2618 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2619 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2620 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2621 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2622 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2623 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2624
2625- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2626 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2627 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2628 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2629
2630- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2631 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2632
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002633C API
2634-----
2635
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002636- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2637 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002638
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002639- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2640 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2641 tp_as_number pointer.
2642
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002643- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2644 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2645 (SF #681367)
2646
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002647- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2648 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2649 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2650 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002651
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002652Tests
2653-----
2654
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002655- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002656 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2657 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2658 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2659 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2660 pydoc.)
2661
2662- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2663
2664- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002665
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002666Windows
2667-------
2668
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002669- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2670 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2671 time).
2672
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002673- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2674 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2675
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002676- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2677 release without strong cryptography.
2678
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002679- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002680 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002681
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002682- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2683 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2684
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002685Mac
2686---
2687
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002688- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2689 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002690
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002691- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2692 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2693 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002694
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002695- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2696 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002697
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002698- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2699 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2700 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2701 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002702
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002703- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002704 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2705 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2706 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002707
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002708
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002709What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002710=================================
2711
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002712*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002713
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002714Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002715--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002716
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002717- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2718
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002719- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2720 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002721 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002722 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002723 a different meaning than before.
2724
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002725- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002726 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002727 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002728
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002729- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002730 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002731 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002732
2733- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2734 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2735 and deallocation.
2736
2737- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2738 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2739
2740- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2741 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2742 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2743 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2744 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2745
2746- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2747 now detected by the garbage collector.
2748
2749- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2750 [SF bug 519621]
2751
2752- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2753 identifier.
2754
2755- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2756 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2757 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2758 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2759 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2760 [SF bug 563060]
2761
2762- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2763 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2764 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2765 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2766 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2767
2768- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2769 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2770 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2771
2772- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2773
2774- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2775 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2776 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2777 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2778 state of the slots would be lost.)
2779
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002780Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002782
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002783- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002784 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2785 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2786 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2787 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002788 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2789 Jython 2.1.
2790
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002791- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002792 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002793 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2794 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2795 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2796 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2797 these, see PEP 302.
2798
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002799- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2800 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2801 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2802
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002803- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2804 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2805 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2806
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002807- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2808 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2809 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2810
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002811- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2812 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2813 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2814 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2815 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2816 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2817 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2818 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2819 releases or implementations.
2820
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002821- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002822 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2823 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002824
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002825- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2826 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2827
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002828- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2829 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2830 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2831
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002832- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2833 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2834
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002835- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2836 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002837 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2838 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002839
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002840- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2841 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2842 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2843 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2844 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2845
2846 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2847 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2848 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2849 pattern.
2850
2851 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2852 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2853 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2854 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2855
2856 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2857 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2858 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2859 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2860 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2861 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2862
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002863- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2864 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2865 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2866 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2867 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2868 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2869 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2870 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002871
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002872- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2873 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2874 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2875 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2876 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002877 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2878 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2879 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2880 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2881 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2882 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2883 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002884
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002885- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2886 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2887
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002888- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2889 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2890 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2891 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2892 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2893 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2894 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2895 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2896 to Zack Weinberg!
2897
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002898- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2899 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2900 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2901 type. This has been fixed now.
2902
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002903- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2904 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2905 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2906
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002907- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2908 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2909 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2910 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2911 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2912 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2913 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2914 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002915 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002916
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002917- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2918 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2919 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002920
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002921- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2922 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2923 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2924 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2925 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2926 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2927 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2928 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002929 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002930 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2931 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2932
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002933- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2934 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2935 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2936 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2937 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2938 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2939 this.)
2940
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002941- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2942 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002943 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002944 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002945 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2946 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002947 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2948 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002949
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002950- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2951 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2952 currently running.
2953
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002954- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2955 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2956 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2957 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2958
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002959- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2960 as directory names.
2961
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002962- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2963 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2964
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002965- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2966 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2967
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002968- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002969 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2970 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002971
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002972- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2973 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2974 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2975 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2976 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2977
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002978- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2979 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2980 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2981 removed.
2982
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002983- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2984 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2985 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2986
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002987- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2988 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2989 to __debug__.
2990
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002991- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2992 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2993 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2994
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002995- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2996 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2997 deprecated now.
2998
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002999- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3000 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3001 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003002
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003003- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3004 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3005 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3006 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3007 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003008
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003009- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3010 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3011
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003012- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3013 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3014 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003015 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003016 is backward compatible.
3017
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003018- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3019 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3020 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3021 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3022 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3023
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003024- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3025 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3026 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3027 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3028 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3029 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003030
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003031- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3032 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3033
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003034- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3035 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3036
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003037- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3038 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3039 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3040 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3041 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3042
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003043- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3044 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3045 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3046
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003047- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003048 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3049
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003050- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3051 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3052 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003053
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003054- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3055 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3056
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003057- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3058 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3059 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3060
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003061- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3062
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003063Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003064-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003065
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003066- Added three operators to the operator module:
3067 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3068 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3069 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3070
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003071- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3072
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003073- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3074 archives.
3075
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003076- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3077 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3078 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3079
3080 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3081
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003082- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3083 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3084 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003085 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003086
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003087- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3088 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3089 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3090 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003091 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3092 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3093 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3094 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003095
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003096- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3097 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003098
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003099- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3100
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003101- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3102 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3103
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003104- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3105 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3106 supported.
3107
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003108- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3109
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003110- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3111 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003112
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003113- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3114 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3115
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003116- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3117
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003118- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3119 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3120
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003121- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3122 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3123 functions but callable type objects.
3124
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003125- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003126 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003127 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003128
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003129- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3130 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003131
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003132- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3133 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003134
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003135- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3136 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3137 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3138 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3139
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003140- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3141 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003142
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003143- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3144 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3145 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3146 and __imul__.
3147
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003148- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003149 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3150 is called.
3151
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003152- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3153 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3154 interpreter was compiled.
3155
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003156- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3157 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3158 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003159 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003160 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3161 1, not 2.
3162
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003163- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3164 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3165 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3166 limit.
3167
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003168- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3169 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3170 bug #623464.
3171
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003172- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3173 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3174 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3175 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3176
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003177Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003178-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003179
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003180- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3181
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003182- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3183 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3184 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3185 with Python 2.3a2.
3186
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003187- os.path exposes getctime.
3188
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003189- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003190 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003191 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003192 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003193 unit tests of floating point results.
3194
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003195- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3196 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3197 has been increased.
3198
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003199- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3200 executed.
3201
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003202- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3203 postinstallation script.
3204
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003205- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3206 test the current module.
3207
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003208- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003209 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3210 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3211 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3212 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3213
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003214- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003215 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003216 Ward's Optik package.
3217
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003218- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3219 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3220 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3221 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3222
3223- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3224 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003225 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003226
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003227- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3228 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3229 shelf are binary pickles.
3230
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003231- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3232 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3233
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003234- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3235 modules are iterators now.
3236
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003237- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3238 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3239 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3240 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3241 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3242 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003243
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003244- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3245 with their entity value.
3246
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003247- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3248
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003249- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3250 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003251
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003252- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3253 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003254 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003255
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003256- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3257 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3258 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3259 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3260 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3261 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3262 main():
3263
3264 import locale
3265 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3266
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003267- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3268 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3269
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003270- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3271 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3272 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3273 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3274 to the new standard.
3275
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003276- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3277 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3278 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3279 an extension to the database.
3280
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003281- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3282 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3283 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3284 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003285 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003286
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003287- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003288 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003289
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003290- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3291 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3292 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3293 bounded integers.
3294
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003295- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3296 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3297 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3298 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3299 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3300 in existence.
3301
3302 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3303 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3304 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3305 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3306 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3307 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3308
3309 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3310 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3311 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3312 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3313
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003314- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3315 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3316 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3317
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003318- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3319
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003320- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3321 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3322 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3323 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3324
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003325- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3326 argument.
3327
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003328- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3329 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3330 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3331 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3332 [SF patch 560794].
3333
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003334- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3335 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3336 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003337 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3338 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3339 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003340
3341- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3342 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003343
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003344- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3345 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3346 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3347 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003348
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003349- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3350 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3351 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3352 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3353 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3354
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003355- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003356
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003357- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3358
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003359- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3360 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3361 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3362 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3363 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3364 identical to None.
3365
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003366- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3367 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3368 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3369 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3370 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3371 results now.
3372
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003373- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3374 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3375
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003376- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3377 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3378 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3379 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3380 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3381 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3382 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3383 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3384
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003385- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3386
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003387- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3388 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3389
3390- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3391 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3392 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3393 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3394 and other systems.
3395
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003396- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3397 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3398 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3399 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 +00003400 work well with these.
3401
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003402- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3403
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003404- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003405 connections.
3406
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003407- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3408 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3409 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3410
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003411- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3412 sets
3413
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003414- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3415 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3416 name.
3417
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003418- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3419 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3420 passed in.
3421
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003422- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003423 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003424 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3425 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003426
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003427- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3428
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003429- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3430
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003431- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3432 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3433 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3434
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003435- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3436 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3437 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3438 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003439 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003440
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003441- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003442 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003443 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003444
3445- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3446 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3447 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3448
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003449- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003450 the value of its expression argument.
3451
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003452- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3453 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3454 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3455
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003456- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3457 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3458 skipstone browser was included.
3459
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003460- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3461 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3462
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003463Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003464-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003465
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003466- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3467 names in addition to accepting file names.
3468
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003469- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3470 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3471 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3472 still used and useful.)
3473
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003474- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3475 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3476 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3477 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003478
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003479- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3480 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3481 the generated binary.
3482
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003483Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003484-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003485
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003486- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3487
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003488- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3489 except in the hands of experts.
3490
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003491- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003492 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3493 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3494 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003495
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003496- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3497 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3498 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3499 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3500 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3501 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3502 builds.
3503
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003504- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3505 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3506 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3507 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3508 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3509 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3510 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3511 new type.
3512
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003513- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003514
3515 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3516 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3517 positive infinities.
3518
3519 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3520 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3521 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3522 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3523 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3524 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3525 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3526
3527 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3528
3529 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3530
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003531- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3532 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3533 size of the executable.
3534
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003535- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3536 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3537 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3538 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003539
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003540- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3541
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003542- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3543 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3544 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003545
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003546- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3547 well as Unix.
3548
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003549- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3550 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3551 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3552 modules in the README file for details.
3553
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003554C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003556
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003557- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3558 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003559 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003560 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003561 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003562
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003563- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3564 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3565 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3566 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3567 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3568 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003569 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003570 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3571 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3572 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3573 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3574 aligned.)
3575
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003576- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3577 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3578 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3579
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003580- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3581 level.
3582
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003583- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3584 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3585 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3586 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3587 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3588
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003589- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3590 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3591 code.
3592
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003593- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3594 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3595 adjusting for negative indices.
3596
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003597- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3598 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3599 object.
3600
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003601- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3602 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3603 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3604
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003605- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3606 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003607
3608- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3609
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003610- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3611 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3612 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3613 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3614
3615- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3616
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003617- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003618
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003619- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003620 without going through the buffer API.
3621
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003622- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003623
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003624- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3625 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3626 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3627 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3628
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003629- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3630 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3631
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003632- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003633 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3634
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003635New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003636-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003637
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003638- OpenVMS is now supported.
3639
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003640- AtheOS is now supported.
3641
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003642- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3643
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003644- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3645
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003646Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003647-----
3648
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003649- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3650 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3651 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003652
3653Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003654-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003655
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003656- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3657 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3658 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3659 bugs.
3660 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003661 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003662 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3663 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003664 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003665
3666- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003667 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003668
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003669- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3670 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3671
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003672- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3673 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003674 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003675 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3676
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003677- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3678 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3679 use files" uninstall option).
3680
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003681- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3682
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003683- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3684 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3685
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003686- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3687 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3688 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3689
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003690- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3691 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3692 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3693 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3694 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003695 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3696 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3697 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003698
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003699- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003700 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003701 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3702 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3703 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3704 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3705 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3706 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3707 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3708 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3709 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3710 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3711 work around.
3712
3713- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3714 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3715 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3716 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3717 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3718 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3719 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3720 specified with O_CREAT too).
3721
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003722Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723----
3724
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003725- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003726
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003727- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3728 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3729 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3730
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003731- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3732 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3733 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3734
3735- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3736 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3737 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3738 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3739 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3740 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3741 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3742 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003743
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003744- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3745 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3746 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003747
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003748- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3749 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3750 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3751 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3752 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003753
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003754- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3755 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3756 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003757
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003758- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3759 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003760
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003761- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3762 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3763 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3764 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3765 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003766
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003767- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3768 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3769 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3770
3771- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3772 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3773 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003774
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003775- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3776 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3777 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3778 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003779 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003780
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003781- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3782 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003783
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003784- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3785 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003786
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003787- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003788 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003789 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3790 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003791
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003792
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003793What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003794===============================
3795
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3797
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003798Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003800
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003801- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3802 with a custom metaclass.
3803
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003804Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003806
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003807- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3808 are proxies.
3809
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003810Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003812
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003813- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3814 very short strings.
3815
3816- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3817 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3818 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3819 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3820 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3821
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003822Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003823-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003824
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003825- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3826 close or delete time).
3827
3828- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3829 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3830
3831- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3832
3833- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003834 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003835
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003836Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003838
3839Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003841
3842C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003844
3845New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003846-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003847
3848Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003849-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003850
3851Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003852-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003853
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003854- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3855
3856- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3857 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3858
3859- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3860 deleted at process exit time.
3861
3862- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3863 in backslash.
3864
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003865Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003867
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003868- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3869 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3870 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3871
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003872
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003873What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003874===========================
3875
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3877
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003878Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003880
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003881- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3882 been extensively updated. See
3883
3884 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3885
3886 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3887
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003888- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3889 deleted!
3890
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003891- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3892 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3893 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3894 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3895 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3896
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003897- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3898
3899 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3900 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3901
3902 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3903 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3904 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3905 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3906 supported anyway.
3907
3908 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3909 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3910
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003911- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3912 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3913 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3914 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3915 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003916
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003917- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3918 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3919 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3920
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003921Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003923
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003924- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3925 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3926 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3927 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3928 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3929 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003930 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3931 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3932 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3933 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003934
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003935- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3936 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3937 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3938
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003939Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003941
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003942- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3943
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003944Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003945-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003946
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003947- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3948 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3949 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3950 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3951 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3952 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3953
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003954- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3955
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003956- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3957
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003958- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3959
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003960- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3961 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3962 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3963
3964- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3965
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003966Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003968
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003969- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3970 off a search on Google.
3971
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003972Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003974
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003975- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3976 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3977 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3978 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3979 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3980 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3981 other platforms should do likewise.
3982
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003983- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3984 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3985 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3986
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003987C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003989
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003990- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3991 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3992 producing key-value pairs.
3993
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003994- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003995 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003996 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3997 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3998 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3999 previously went unchallenged.
4000
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004001New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004003
4004Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004005-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004006
4007Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004009
4010Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004012
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004013- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4014 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004015
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004016- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4017 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4018 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4019 home.
4020
4021
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004022What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004023===========================
4024
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004025*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4026
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004027Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004029
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004030- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4031 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004032
4033 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004034 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004035
4036 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4037 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004038 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004039 This needs to be documented.
4040
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004041- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4042 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4043
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004044- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4045 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4046 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4047
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004048- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4049 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4050
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004051- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4052 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4053 class forbids it).
4054
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004055- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4056 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4057 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4058
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004059- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4060
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004061Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004063
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004064- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4065 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004066 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004067
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004068- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4069 (like 1 + '').
4070
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004071Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004073
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004074- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4075 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4076 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4077 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004078 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004079 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4080
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004081- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4082 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4083 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4084 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4085
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004086- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4087 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004088 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4089 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4090 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004091
4092- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4093 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004094
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004095- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4096 bytes on its input.
4097
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004098Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004100
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004101- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004102 convenience function.
4103
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004104- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4105 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4106 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004107 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4108 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4109 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4110 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4111 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4112 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004113
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004114- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4115 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4116 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4117 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4118
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004119- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4120 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4121 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4122
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004123- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4124 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4125 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4126 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4127
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004128- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4129 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004131 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4132 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4133 new -l and -e options.
4134
4135- statcache is now deprecated.
4136
4137- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4138 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004140 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4141 time properly taken into account.
4142
4143- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4144 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4145 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4146 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4147
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004148Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004150
4151Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004153
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004154- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4155 is built with libdb3 if available.
4156
4157- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4158
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004159C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004160-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004161
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004162- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4163 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4164 PySequence_Size().
4165
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004166- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4167
4168- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4169 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4170 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4171
4172- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4173 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4174
4175- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4176 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4177
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004178New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004180
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004181- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4182 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4183
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004184- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4185 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4186
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004187- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4188
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004189Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004191
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004192- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4193 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4194
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004195Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004197
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004198Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004199----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004200
4201- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4202 removed completely in the next release.
4203
4204- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4205 OSX.
4206
4207- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4208 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4209
4210- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4211
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004212
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004213What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004214===========================
4215
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004216*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4217
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004218Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004220
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004221- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004222 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004223 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004224 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4225 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004226 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4227 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004228 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4229 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004230
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004231- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4232 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4233
4234- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4235 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4236
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004237Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004239
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004240- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4241 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4242 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4243 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4244 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4245 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4246 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4247 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4248
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004249- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4250 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4251 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4252 example).
4253
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004254- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004255 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004256 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004257 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004258
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004259- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4260 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4261 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004262 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004263
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004264- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4265 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4266 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4267 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4268 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4269 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4270
4271 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4272
4273 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4274
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004275Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004277
4278- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4279
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004280- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4281
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004282- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4283 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004284
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004285- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4286 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4287 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4288 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4289 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4290 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004291 attributes.
4292
4293- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4294 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4295 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004296
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004297- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4298 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4299 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004300
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004301- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4302 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4303 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004304 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4305 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4306
4307- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4308 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004309
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004310Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004312
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004313- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4314 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4315
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004316- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4317 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4318 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4319 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4320
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004321- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4322 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4323 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4324 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4325
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004326 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4327 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4328 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4329 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4330 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4331 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4332 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4333 without losing information).
4334
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004335- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004336 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4337 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4338 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4339 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4340 module).
4341
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004342 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004343 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4344 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4345 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4346 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004347
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004348- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004349 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4350 encoding.
4351
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004352- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4353 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4354
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004355- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004356 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4357
4358- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4359 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4360 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4361 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4362
4363- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4364
4365- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4366 ON, and OFF.
4367
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004368- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4369 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4370
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004371Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004372-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004373
4374- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4375 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4376 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004377
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004378- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4379 been added: -X and -E.
4380
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004381Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004383
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004384- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4385 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4386
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004387C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004389
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004390- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4391 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4392 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4393 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4394 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4395
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004396- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4397 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4398 as long) arguments.
4399
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004400- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4401 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4402 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4403 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4404 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4405 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4406
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004407- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4408 input.
4409
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004410New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004412
4413Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004415
4416Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004418
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004419- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4420 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4421 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4422
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004423- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4424 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4425 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004426 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004427
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4429 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4430 import signal
4431 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004432
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004434 while 1:
4435 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004437 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4438 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4439 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4440 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004441
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004442
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004443What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4444===========================
4445
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004446*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4447
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004448Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004449--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004450
4451- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4452 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4453 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4454
4455- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4456 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4457 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4458 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4459 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4460 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4461 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004462
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004463- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004464 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004465 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4466 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4467 associate a docstring with a property.
4468
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004469- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4470 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4471 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4472 other built-in object types.
4473
4474- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4475 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4476 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4477 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4478 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4479
4480- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4481 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4482
4483- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4484 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004485 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004486 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4487 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4488 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4489 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4490 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4491
4492- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4493 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4494 class.
4495
4496- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4497 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4498 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4499 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4500
4501- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4502 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4503 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4504 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4505
4506- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4507 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4508
4509- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4510 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4511 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4512 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4513 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004514 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004515 with the same value as s.
4516
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004517- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4518
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004519Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004521
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004522- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4523
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004524- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4525 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4526 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4527 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4528 objects.
4529
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004530- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4531 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004532 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4533 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4534
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004535- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4536 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4537 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4538
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004539Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004541
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004542- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4543 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4544 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4545 by the instances.
4546
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004547- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4548 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4549 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4550
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004551- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4552 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4553 before the entire comparison is complete.
4554
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004555- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4556 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4557 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4558
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004559- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4560 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4561 getwriter().
4562
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004563- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4564 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4565
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004566- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004567 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4568 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4569
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004570- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4571 iterable object.
4572
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004573- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4574 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004575
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004576- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4577 authentication.
4578
4579- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4580 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004581
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004582- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004583 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4584 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4585 a sample driver.)
4586
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004587Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004589
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004590- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4591 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4592 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4593 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4594 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4595 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4596 kernel has large file support.
4597
4598- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4599 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4600 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4601 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4602 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4603
4604- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4605 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4606 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4607
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004608C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004610
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004611- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4612 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4613
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004614New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004615-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004616
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004617- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4618 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4619
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004620Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004621-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004622
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004623- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4624 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4625 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4626 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4627 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4628
4629- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4630 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4631 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4632 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4633
4634- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4635 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4636
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004637Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004639
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004640- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004641 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4642 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004643
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004644
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004645What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4646===========================
4647
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4649
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004650Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004652
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004653- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4654 big to represent as a C double.
4655
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004656- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4657 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4658 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4659 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4660 restriction).
4661
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004662- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4663 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4664 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4665 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4666 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4667
4668 >>> dir([])
4669 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4670 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4671 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4672 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4673 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4674 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4675 'reverse', 'sort']
4676
4677 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4678
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004679- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004680 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4681 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4682 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4683 OverflowError exception.
4684
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004685- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004686 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004687 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4688 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4689 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4690 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4691 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004692 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004693 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4694 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4695
4696 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4697 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4698 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4699 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004700
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004701- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004702 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4703 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4704 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4705 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4706 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4707 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4708 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4709 once it is created.
4710
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004711- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4712 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4713 (key, value) pairs.
4714
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004715- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004716 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4717 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4718
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004719- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4720 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4721 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4722 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4723 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004724
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004725- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004726 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4727 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4728
4729 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4730
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004731- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004732 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4733
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004734Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004736
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004737- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004738 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4739 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004740
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004741- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4742 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4743 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4744 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4745 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4746 in this area anymore).
4747
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004748- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4749 threading.Timer.
4750
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004751- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4752 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4753
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004754- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004755 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4756
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004757- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004758 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4759 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4760 converted to Python longs.
4761
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004762- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004763 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4764
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004765- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4766 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4767 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4768
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004769Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004771
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004772- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4773 division operators as per PEP 238.
4774
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004775Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004777
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004778- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4779 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4780 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4781 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4782
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004783C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004785
4786- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004787
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004788- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4789 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004790 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004791
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004792 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4793 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004794 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004796
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004797- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004798 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4799 module:
4800
4801 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004802
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004803 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4804 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004805
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004806 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4807 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004808
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004809 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4810
4811 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4812
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004813- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004814 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4815 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4816 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004817
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004818New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004820
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004821- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4822 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4823 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4824 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4825 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004826
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004827Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004828-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004829
4830Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004832
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004833- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4834 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4835 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4836 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004837 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4838 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4839 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4840 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4841 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004842
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004843- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004844 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4845
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004846
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004847What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4848===========================
4849
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004850*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4851
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004852Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004853-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004854
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004855- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4856 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4857
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004858- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4859 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4860 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004861
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004862- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4863 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4864 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4865 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004866
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004867- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4868
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004870
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004871Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004873
4874- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004875 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004876 the module docstring for details.
4877
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004878Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004880
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004881- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004882 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4883 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4884 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004885
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004886- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4887 Nick Mathewson.
4888
4889Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004890----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004891
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004892- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4893 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4894 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4895 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4896 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4897 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4898 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4899 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4900
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004901- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4902 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4903 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4904 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4905
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004906- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4907 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4908 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4909 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4910 come a long way).
4911
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004912- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4913 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4914 write filters for these warnings).
4915
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004916- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4917 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4918 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4919 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4920 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4921
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004922- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4923 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4924 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4925 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4926 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4927 older distribution.
4928
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004929Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004931
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004932- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4933 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004934 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004935
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004936- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4937 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4938 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4939
4940- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4941
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004942- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4943
4944- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4945
4946- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4947
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004948- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004949
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004950- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4951
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004952New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004953-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004954
4955C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004957
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004958- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4959 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4960 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4961 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4962 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4963 against buffer overruns.
4964
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004965- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004966 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4967 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004968 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4969 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4970 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4971
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004972- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4973 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4974 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4975 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4976 deprecated.
4977
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004978Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004979-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004980
4981- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4982 relevant is found.
4983
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004984
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004985What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004986===========================
4987
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4989
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004990Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004992
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004993- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4994 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4995 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4996 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4997 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4998 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4999 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5000 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005001 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005002 repaired.
5003
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005004- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005005 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005006 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5007 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5008 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5009 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5010 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5011 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5012 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5013 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5014
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005015- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5016 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5017 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5018 leading BMO character).
5019
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005020- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5021 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5022 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5023
5024 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5025 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5026 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005027
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005028 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5029 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5030 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5031 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5032 for various simple to use conversions.
5033
5034 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5035 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5036
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5038 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5039 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5040 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5041 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5042 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5043 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5044 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5045 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5046 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5047 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5048 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5049 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5050 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5051 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005052
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005053- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5054 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5055 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005056 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005057 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005058
5059 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005060 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5061 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5062 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5063 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5064 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005065 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5066 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005067
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005068 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5069 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5070 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005071 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005072
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005073- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5074 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5075 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5076 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5077 floating arithmetic,
5078
5079 x = 9007199254740992.0
5080 print long(x)
5081
5082 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5083 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5084 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5085 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5086 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5087 functions are of good quality).
5088
5089 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5090 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5091 algorithms to break.
5092
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005093- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5094 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5095 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5096 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5097 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5098 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5099 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5100 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5101 order.
5102
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005103- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5104 operation along the most common code paths.
5105
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005106- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5107 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5108
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005109- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5110 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5111 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5112 {}.update(UserDict())
5113
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005114- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5115 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5116 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5117 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5118 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5119 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5120 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5121 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5122
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005123- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005124 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005125
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005126 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005127 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5128 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005129 join() method of strings
5130 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005131 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5132 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005133 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005134 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005135
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005136- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5137 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5138
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005139- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5140 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5141
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005142- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5143 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5144 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5145 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5146
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005147- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5148 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005149 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005150 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5151 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005152
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005153- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5154
5155
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005156Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005157-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005158
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005159- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005160 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005161 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5162 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5163
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005164- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5165 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5166
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005167- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5168 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5169 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5170 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5171
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005172- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5173 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5174 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5175
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005176- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5177
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005178- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5179
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005180- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5181 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5182 that are still imported into string.py).
5183
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005184- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5185
5186- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5187 Now it does.
5188
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005189- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5190
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005191- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5192 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5193 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5194 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5195 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005196 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5197 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005198
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005199- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5200 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5201 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5202 'help(object)'.
5203
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005204Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005205-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005206
5207- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005208 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005209 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5210 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5211
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005212- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005213 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5214 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005215
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005216C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005217-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005218
5219- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5220 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005221
5222----
5223
5224**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**