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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
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Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00008=================================
9
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000010*XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX*
11
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000012Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000013--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000014
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +000015- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
16
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000017- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
18 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000019 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000020 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000021 a different meaning than before.
22
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +000023- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
24 integer range, so int("4"*1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
25 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000026
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +000027- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000028 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +000029 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000030
31- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
32 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
33 and deallocation.
34
35- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
36 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
37
38- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
39 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
40 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
41 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
42 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
43
44- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
45 now detected by the garbage collector.
46
47- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
48 [SF bug 519621]
49
50- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
51 identifier.
52
53- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
54 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
55 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
56 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
57 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
58 [SF bug 563060]
59
60- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
61 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
62 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
63 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
64 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
65
66- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
67 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
68 not called. [SF bug #537450]
69
70- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
71
72- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
73 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
74 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
75 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
76 state of the slots would be lost.)
77
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000078Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000079-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000080
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +000081- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
82 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
83 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
84 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
85 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
86 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
87 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
88 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
89 releases or implementations.
90
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +000091- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +000092 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
93 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +000094
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +000095- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
96 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
97
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +000098- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
99 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
100 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
101
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000102- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
103 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
104
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000105- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
106 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
107 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but not kept up
108 to date).
109
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000110- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
111 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
112 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
113 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
114 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
115
116 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
117 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
118 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
119 pattern.
120
121 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
122 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
123 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
124 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
125
126 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
127 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
128 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
129 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
130 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
131 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
132
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000133 - The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
134 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
135 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables. In
136 addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
Neal Norwitz7165af22002-09-05 21:42:24 +0000137 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
138 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
139 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
140 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000141
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000142- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
143 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
144 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
145 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
146 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000147 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
148 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
149 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
150 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
151 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
152 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
153 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000154
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000155- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
156 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
157
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000158- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
159 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
160 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
161 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
162 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
163 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
164 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
165 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
166 to Zack Weinberg!
167
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000168- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
169 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
170 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
171 type. This has been fixed now.
172
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000173- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
174 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
175 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
176
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000177- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
178 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
179 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
180 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
181 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
182 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
183 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
184 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000185 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000186
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000187- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
188 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
189 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000190
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000191- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
192 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
193 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
194 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
195 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
196 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
197 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
198 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000199 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000200 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
201 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
202
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000203- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
204 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
205 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
206 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
207 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
208 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
209 this.)
210
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000211- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
212 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000213 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000214 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000215 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
216 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000217 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
218 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000219
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000220- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
221 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
222 currently running.
223
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000224- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
225 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
226 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
227 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
228
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000229- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
230 as directory names.
231
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000232- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
233 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
234
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000235- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
236 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
237
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000238- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000239 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
240 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000241
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000242- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
243 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
244 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
245 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
246 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
247
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000248- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
249 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
250 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
251 removed.
252
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000253- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
254 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
255 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
256
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000257- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
258 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
259 to __debug__.
260
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000261- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
262 string to the left with zeros. For example,
263 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
264
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000265- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
266 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
267 deprecated now.
268
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000269- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
270 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
271 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000272
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000273- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
274 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
275 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
276 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
277 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000278
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000279- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
280 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
281
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000282- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
283 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
284 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000285 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000286 is backward compatible.
287
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000288- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
289 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
290 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
291 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
292 could access a pointer to freed memory.
293
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000294- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
295 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
296 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
297 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
298 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
299 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000300
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000301- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
302 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
303
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000304- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
305 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
306
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000307- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
308 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
309 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
310 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
311 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
312
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000313- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
314 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
315 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
316
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000317- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000318 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
319
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000320Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000321-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000322
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000323- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
324 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
325 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000326 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000327
Andrew M. Kuchling50905d02002-11-26 12:31:09 +0000328- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has been
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000329 added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is still
330 available in source code, but not built automatically anymore, and
331 is now named bsddb185.
332
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000333- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
334 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000335
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000336- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
337
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000338- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
339 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
340
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000341- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
342 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
343 supported.
344
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000345- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
346
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000347- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
348 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000349
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000350- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
351 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
352
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000353- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
354
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000355- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
356 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
357
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000358- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
359 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
360 functions but callable type objects.
361
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000362- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000363 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000364 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000365
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000366- posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and posix.getpgid have been
367 added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000368
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000369- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
370 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000371
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000372- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
373 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
374 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
375 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
376
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000377- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
378 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000379
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000380- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
381 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
382 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
383 and __imul__.
384
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000385- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000386 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
387 is called.
388
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000389- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
390 been added where available.
391
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000392- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
393 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
394 interpreter was compiled.
395
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000396- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
397 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
398 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000399 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000400 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
401 1, not 2.
402
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000403- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
404 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
405 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
406 limit.
407
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000408- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
409 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
410 bug #623464.
411
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000412Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000413-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000414
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000415- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
416 test the current module.
417
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000418- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
419 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
420 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
421 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
422 this behavior needs to be controlled.
423
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000424- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000425 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000426 Ward's Optik package.
427
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000428- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
429 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
430 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
431 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
432
433- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
434 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000435 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000436
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000437- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
438 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
439
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000440- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
441 modules are iterators now.
442
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000443- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
444 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
445 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
446 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
447 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
448 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000449
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000450- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
451 with their entity value.
452
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000453- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
454
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000455- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
456 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000457
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000458- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
459 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000460 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000461
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000462- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
463 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
464 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
465 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
466 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
467 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
468 main():
469
470 import locale
471 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
472
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000473- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
474 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
475
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000476- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
477 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
478 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
479 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
480 to the new standard.
481
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000482- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
483 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
484 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
485 an extension to the database.
486
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000487- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
488 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
489 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
490 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
491 is the base class of the two. (This is not documented yet, but
492 help(sets) gives a wealth of information.)
493
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000494- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
495
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000496- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000497 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000498
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000499- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
500 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
501 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
502 bounded integers.
503
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000504- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
505 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
506 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
507
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000508- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
509
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000510- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
511 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
512 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
513 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
514
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000515- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
516 argument.
517
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000518- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
519 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
520 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
521 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
522 [SF patch 560794].
523
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000524- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
525 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
526 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000527 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
528 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
529 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000530
531- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
532 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000533
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000534- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
535 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
536 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
537 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000538
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000539- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
540 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
541 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
542 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
543 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
544
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000545- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000546
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000547- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
548 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
549 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
550 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
551 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
552 identical to None.
553
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000554- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
555 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
556 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
557 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
558 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
559 results now.
560
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000561- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
562 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
563
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000564- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
565 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
566 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
567 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
568 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
569 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
570 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
571 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
572
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000573- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
574
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000575- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
576 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
577
578- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
579 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
580 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
581 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
582 and other systems.
583
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000584- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
585 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
586 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
587 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 +0000588 work well with these.
589
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000590- compileall now supports quiet operation.
591
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000592- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000593 connections.
594
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000595- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
596 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
597 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
598
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000599- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
600 sets
601
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000602- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
603 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
604 name.
605
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000606- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
607 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
608 passed in.
609
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000610- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000611 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000612 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
613 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000614
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000615- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
616
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000617- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
618
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000619- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
620 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
621 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
622
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000623- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
624 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
625 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
626 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
627 honored.
628
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000629- distutils' build_ext command now links c++ extensions with the c++
630 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
631 running under *nix.
632
633- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
634 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
635 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
636
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000637- New pdb command `pp' which is like `p' except that it pretty-prints
638 the value of its expression argument.
639
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000640- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
641 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
642 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
643
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000644- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
645 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
646 skipstone browser was included.
647
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000648Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000649-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000650
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000651- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
652 names in addition to accepting file names.
653
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000654- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
655 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
656 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
657 still used and useful.)
658
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000659- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
660 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
661 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
662 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000663
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000664- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
665 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
666 the generated binary.
667
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000668Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000669-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000670
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000671- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
672
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000673- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
674 except in the hands of experts.
675
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000676- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000677 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
678 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
679 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000680
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000681- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
682 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
683 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
684 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
685 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
686 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
687 builds.
688
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000689- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
690 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
691 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
692 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
693 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
694 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
695 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
696 new type.
697
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000698- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000699
700 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
701 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
702 positive infinities.
703
704 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
705 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
706 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
707 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
708 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
709 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
710 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
711
712 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
713
714 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
715
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000716- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
717 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
718 size of the executable.
719
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000720- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
721 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
722 configure script. On other platforms, remove
723 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000724
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000725- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
726
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000727- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
728 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
729 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000730
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000731- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
732 well as Unix.
733
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000734- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
735 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
736 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
737 modules in the README file for details.
738
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000739C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000740-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000741
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000742- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
743 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000744 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000745 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000746 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000747
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000748- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
749 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
750 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
751 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
752 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
753 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
754 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
755 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
756 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
757 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
758 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
759 aligned.)
760
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000761- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
762 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
763 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
764
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000765- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
766 level.
767
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000768- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
769 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
770 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
771 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
772 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
773
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +0000774- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
775 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
776 code.
777
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000778- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
779 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
780 adjusting for negative indices.
781
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000782- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
783 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
784 object.
785
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000786- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
787 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
788 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
789
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000790- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
791 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000792
793- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
794
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000795- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
796 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
797 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
798 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
799
800- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
801
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +0000802- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000803
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000804- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +0000805 without going through the buffer API.
806
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000807- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +0000808
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +0000809- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
810 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
811 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
812 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
813
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000814- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
815 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
816
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000817- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000818 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
819
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000820New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000821-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000822
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +0000823- AtheOS is now supported.
824
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +0000825- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
826
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +0000827- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
828
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000829Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000830-----
831
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +0000832- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
833 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
834 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000835
836Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000837-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000838
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000839- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
840 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
841 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
842 bugs.
843 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +0000844 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
845 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
846 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000847 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
848
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +0000849- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
850 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
851
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +0000852- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
853 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
854 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
855 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
856
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +0000857- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
858 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
859 use files" uninstall option).
860
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +0000861- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
862
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000863- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
864 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
865
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000866- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
867 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
868 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
869
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000870- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
871 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
872 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
873 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
874 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000875 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
876 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
877 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000878
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000879- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000880 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000881 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
882 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
883 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
884 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
885 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
886 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
887 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
888 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
889 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
890 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
891 work around.
892
893- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
894 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
895 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
896 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
897 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
898 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
899 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
900 specified with O_CREAT too).
901
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000902Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000903----
904
905Yet to be written.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000906
907
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000908What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000909===============================
910
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000911*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
912
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000913Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000914--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000915
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000916- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
917 with a custom metaclass.
918
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000919Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000920-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000921
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000922- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
923 are proxies.
924
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000925Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000926-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000927
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000928- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
929 very short strings.
930
931- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
932 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
933 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
934 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
935 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
936
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000937Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000938-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000939
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000940- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
941 close or delete time).
942
943- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
944 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
945
946- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
947
948- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000949 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000950
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000951Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000952-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000953
954Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000955-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000956
957C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000958-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000959
960New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000961-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000962
963Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000964-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000965
966Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000967-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000968
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000969- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
970
971- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
972 instances are deleted at process exit time.
973
974- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
975 deleted at process exit time.
976
977- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
978 in backslash.
979
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000980Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000981----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000982
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000983- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
984 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
985 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
986
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000987
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +0000988What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000989===========================
990
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000991*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
992
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000993Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000994--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000995
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000996- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
997 been extensively updated. See
998
999 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1000
1001 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1002
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001003- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1004 deleted!
1005
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001006- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1007 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1008 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1009 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1010 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1011
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001012- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1013
1014 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1015 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1016
1017 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1018 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1019 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1020 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1021 supported anyway.
1022
1023 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1024 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1025
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001026- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1027 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1028 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1029 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1030 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001031
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001032- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1033 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1034 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1035
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001036Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001037-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001038
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001039- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1040 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1041 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1042 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1043 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1044 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001045 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1046 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1047 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1048 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001049
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001050- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1051 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1052 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1053
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001054Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001055-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001056
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001057- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1058
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001059Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001060-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001061
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001062- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1063 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1064 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1065 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1066 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1067 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1068
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001069- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1070
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001071- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1072
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001073- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1074
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001075- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1076 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1077 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1078
1079- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1080
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001081Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001082-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001083
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001084- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1085 off a search on Google.
1086
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001087Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001088-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001089
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001090- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1091 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1092 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1093 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1094 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1095 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1096 other platforms should do likewise.
1097
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001098- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1099 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1100 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1101
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001102C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001103-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001104
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001105- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1106 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1107 producing key-value pairs.
1108
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001109- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001110 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001111 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1112 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1113 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1114 previously went unchallenged.
1115
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001116New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001117-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001118
1119Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001120-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001121
1122Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001123-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001124
1125Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001126----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001127
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001128- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1129 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001130
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001131- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1132 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1133 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1134 home.
1135
1136
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001137What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001138===========================
1139
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001140*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1141
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001142Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001143--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001144
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001145- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1146 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001147
1148 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001149 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001150
1151 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1152 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001153 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001154 This needs to be documented.
1155
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001156- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1157 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1158
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001159- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1160 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1161 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1162
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001163- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1164 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1165
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001166- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1167 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1168 class forbids it).
1169
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001170- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1171 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1172 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1173
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001174- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1175
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001176Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001177-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001178
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001179- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1180 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001181 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001182
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001183- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1184 (like 1 + '').
1185
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001186Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001187-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001188
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001189- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1190 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1191 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1192 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001193 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001194 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1195
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001196- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1197 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1198 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1199 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1200
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001201- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1202 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001203 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1204 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1205 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001206
1207- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1208 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001209
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001210- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1211 bytes on its input.
1212
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001213Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001214-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001215
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001216- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001217 convenience function.
1218
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001219- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1220 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1221 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001222 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1223 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1224 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1225 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1226 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1227 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001228
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001229- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1230 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1231 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1232 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1233
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001234- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1235 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1236 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1237
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001238- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1239 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1240 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1241 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1242
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001243- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1244 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001245 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001246 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1247 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1248 new -l and -e options.
1249
1250- statcache is now deprecated.
1251
1252- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1253 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001254 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001255 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1256 time properly taken into account.
1257
1258- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1259 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1260 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1261 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1262
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001263Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001264-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001265
1266Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001267-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001268
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001269- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1270 is built with libdb3 if available.
1271
1272- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1273
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001274C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001275-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001276
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001277- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1278 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1279 PySequence_Size().
1280
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001281- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1282
1283- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1284 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1285 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1286
1287- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1288 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1289
1290- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1291 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1292
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001293New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001294-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001295
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001296- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1297 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1298
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001299- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1300 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1301
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001302- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1303
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001304Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001305-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001306
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001307- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1308 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1309
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001310Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001311-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001312
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001313Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001314----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001315
1316- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1317 removed completely in the next release.
1318
1319- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1320 OSX.
1321
1322- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1323 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1324
1325- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1326
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001327
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001328What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001329===========================
1330
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001331*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1332
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001333Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001334--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001335
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001336- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001337 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001338 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001339 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1340 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001341 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1342 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001343 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1344 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001345
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001346- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1347 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1348
1349- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1350 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1351
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001352Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001353-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001354
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001355- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1356 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1357 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1358 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1359 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1360 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1361 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1362 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1363
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001364- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1365 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1366 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1367 example).
1368
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001369- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001370 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001371 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001372 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001373
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001374- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1375 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1376 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001377 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001378
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001379- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1380 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1381 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1382 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1383 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1384 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1385
1386 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1387
1388 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1389
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001390Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001391-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001392
1393- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1394
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001395- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1396
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001397- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1398 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001399
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001400- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1401 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1402 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1403 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1404 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1405 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001406 attributes.
1407
1408- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1409 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1410 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001411
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001412- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1413 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1414 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001415
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001416- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1417 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1418 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001419 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1420 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1421
1422- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1423 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001424
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001425Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001426-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001427
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001428- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1429 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1430
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001431- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1432 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1433 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1434 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1435
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001436- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1437 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1438 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1439 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1440
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001441 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1442 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1443 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1444 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1445 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1446 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1447 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1448 without losing information).
1449
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001450- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001451 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1452 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1453 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1454 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1455 module).
1456
1457 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1458 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1459 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1460 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1461 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001462
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001463- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001464 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1465 encoding.
1466
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001467- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1468 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1469
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001470- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001471 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1472
1473- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1474 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1475 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1476 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1477
1478- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1479
1480- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1481 ON, and OFF.
1482
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001483- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1484 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1485
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001486Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001487-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001488
1489- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1490 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1491 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001492
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001493- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1494 been added: -X and -E.
1495
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001496Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001497-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001498
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001499- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1500 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1501
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001502C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001503-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001504
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001505- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1506 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1507 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1508 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1509 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1510
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001511- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1512 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1513 as long) arguments.
1514
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001515- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1516 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1517 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1518 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1519 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1520 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1521
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001522- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1523 input.
1524
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001525New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001526-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001527
1528Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001529-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001530
1531Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001532-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001533
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001534- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1535 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1536 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1537
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001538- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1539 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1540 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001541 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001542
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001543 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1544 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1545 import signal
1546 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001547
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001548 try:
1549 while 1:
1550 pass
1551 except KeyboardInterrupt:
1552 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1553 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1554 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1555 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001556
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001557
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001558What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1559===========================
1560
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001561*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1562
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001563Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001564--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001565
1566- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1567 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1568 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1569
1570- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1571 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1572 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1573 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1574 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1575 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1576 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001577
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001578- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001579 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001580 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1581 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1582 associate a docstring with a property.
1583
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001584- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1585 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1586 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1587 other built-in object types.
1588
1589- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1590 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1591 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1592 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1593 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1594
1595- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1596 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1597
1598- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1599 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001600 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001601 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1602 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1603 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1604 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1605 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1606
1607- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1608 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1609 class.
1610
1611- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1612 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1613 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1614 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1615
1616- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1617 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1618 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1619 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1620
1621- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1622 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1623
1624- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1625 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1626 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1627 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1628 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001629 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001630 with the same value as s.
1631
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001632- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1633
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001634Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001635----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001636
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001637- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1638
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001639- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1640 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1641 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1642 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1643 objects.
1644
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001645- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1646 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001647 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1648 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1649
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001650- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1651 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1652 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1653
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001654Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001655-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001656
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001657- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1658 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1659 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1660 by the instances.
1661
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001662- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1663 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1664 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1665
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001666- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1667 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1668 before the entire comparison is complete.
1669
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001670- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1671 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1672 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1673
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001674- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1675 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1676 getwriter().
1677
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001678- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1679 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1680
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001681- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001682 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1683 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1684
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001685- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1686 iterable object.
1687
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001688- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1689 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001690
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001691- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1692 authentication.
1693
1694- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1695 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001696
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001697- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001698 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1699 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1700 a sample driver.)
1701
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001702Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001703-----
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001704
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001705Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001706-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001707
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001708- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1709 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1710 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1711 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1712 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1713 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1714 kernel has large file support.
1715
1716- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1717 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1718 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1719 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1720 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1721
1722- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1723 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1724 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1725
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001726C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001727-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001728
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001729- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1730 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1731
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001732New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001733-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001734
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001735- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1736 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1737
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001738Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001739-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001740
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001741- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
1742 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
1743 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
1744 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
1745 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
1746
1747- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
1748 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
1749 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
1750 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
1751
1752- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
1753 especially in regard to reporting errors.
1754
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001755Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001756-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001757
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001758- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001759 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
1760 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001761
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001762
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001763What's New in Python 2.2a3?
1764===========================
1765
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001766*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
1767
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001768Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001769----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001770
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001771- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
1772 big to represent as a C double.
1773
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00001774- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
1775 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
1776 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
1777 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
1778 restriction).
1779
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00001780- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
1781 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
1782 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
1783 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
1784 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
1785
1786 >>> dir([])
1787 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
1788 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
1789 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
1790 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
1791 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
1792 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
1793 'reverse', 'sort']
1794
1795 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
1796
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001797- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001798 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
1799 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
1800 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
1801 OverflowError exception.
1802
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00001803- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001804 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001805 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
1806 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
1807 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
1808 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
1809 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001810 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001811 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
1812 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
1813
1814 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
1815 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
1816 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
1817 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001818
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001819- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001820 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
1821 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
1822 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
1823 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
1824 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
1825 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
1826 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
1827 once it is created.
1828
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00001829- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
1830 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
1831 (key, value) pairs.
1832
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001833- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001834 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
1835 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
1836
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00001837- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
1838 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
1839 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
1840 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
1841 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001842
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001843- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001844 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
1845 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
1846
1847 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
1848
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001849- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00001850 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
1851
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001852Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001853-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001854
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001855- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00001856 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
1857 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001858
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00001859- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
1860 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
1861 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
1862 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
1863 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
1864 in this area anymore).
1865
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00001866- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
1867 threading.Timer.
1868
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00001869- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
1870 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
1871
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001872- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001873 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
1874
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001875- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00001876 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
1877 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
1878 converted to Python longs.
1879
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001880- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001881 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
1882
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00001883- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
1884 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
1885 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
1886
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001887Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001888-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001889
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001890- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
1891 division operators as per PEP 238.
1892
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001893Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001894-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001895
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001896- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
1897 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
1898 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
1899 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
1900
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001901C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001902-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001903
1904- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001905
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001906- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
1907 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001908 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001909
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001910 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
1911 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
1912 /* The conversion failed. */
1913 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001914
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001915- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001916 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
1917 module:
1918
1919 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001920
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001921 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
1922 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001923
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001924 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
1925 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001926
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001927 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
1928
1929 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
1930
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001931- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001932 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
1933 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
1934 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001935
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001936New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001937-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001938
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00001939- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
1940 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
1941 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
1942 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
1943 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001944
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001945Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001946-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001947
1948Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001949-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001950
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001951- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
1952 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
1953 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
1954 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00001955 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
1956 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
1957 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
1958 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
1959 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001960
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001961- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00001962 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
1963
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001964
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001965What's New in Python 2.2a2?
1966===========================
1967
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001968*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
1969
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001970Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001971-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001972
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00001973- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
1974 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
1975
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001976- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
1977 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
1978 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001979
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00001980- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
1981 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
1982 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
1983 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001984
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001985- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
1986
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001987- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001988
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001989Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001990-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001991
1992- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00001993 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001994 the module docstring for details.
1995
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001996Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001997-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001998
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001999- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002000 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2001 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2002 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002003
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002004- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2005 Nick Mathewson.
2006
2007Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002008----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002009
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002010- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2011 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2012 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2013 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2014 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2015 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2016 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2017 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2018
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002019- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2020 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2021 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2022 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2023
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002024- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2025 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2026 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2027 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2028 come a long way).
2029
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002030- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2031 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2032 write filters for these warnings).
2033
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002034- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2035 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2036 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2037 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2038 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2039
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002040- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2041 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2042 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2043 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2044 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2045 older distribution.
2046
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002047Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002048-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002049
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002050- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2051 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002052 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002053
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002054- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2055 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2056 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2057
2058- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2059
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002060- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2061
2062- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2063
2064- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2065
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002066- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002067
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002068- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2069
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002070New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002071-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002072
2073C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002074-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002075
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002076- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2077 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2078 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2079 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2080 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2081 against buffer overruns.
2082
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002083- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002084 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2085 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002086 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2087 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2088 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2089
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002090- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2091 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2092 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2093 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2094 deprecated.
2095
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002096Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002097-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002098
2099- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2100 relevant is found.
2101
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002102
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002103What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002104===========================
2105
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002106*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2107
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002108Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002109----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002110
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002111- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2112 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2113 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2114 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2115 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2116 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2117 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2118 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002119 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002120 repaired.
2121
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002122- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002123 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002124 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2125 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2126 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2127 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2128 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2129 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2130 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2131 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2132
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002133- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2134 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2135 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2136 leading BMO character).
2137
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002138- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2139 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2140 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2141
2142 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2143 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2144 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002145
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002146 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2147 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2148 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2149 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2150 for various simple to use conversions.
2151
2152 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2153 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2154
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002155 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2156 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2157 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2158 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2159 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2160 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2161 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2162 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2163 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2164 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2165 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2166 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2167 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2168 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2169 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002170
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002171- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2172 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2173 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002174 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002175 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002176
2177 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002178 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2179 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2180 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2181 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2182 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002183 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2184 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002185
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002186 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2187 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2188 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002189 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002190
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002191- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2192 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2193 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2194 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2195 floating arithmetic,
2196
2197 x = 9007199254740992.0
2198 print long(x)
2199
2200 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2201 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2202 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2203 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2204 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2205 functions are of good quality).
2206
2207 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2208 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2209 algorithms to break.
2210
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002211- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2212 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2213 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2214 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2215 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2216 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2217 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2218 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2219 order.
2220
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002221- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2222 operation along the most common code paths.
2223
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002224- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2225 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2226
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002227- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2228 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2229 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2230 {}.update(UserDict())
2231
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002232- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2233 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2234 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2235 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2236 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2237 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2238 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2239 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2240
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002241- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002242 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002243
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002244 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002245 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2246 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002247 join() method of strings
2248 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002249 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2250 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002251 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002252 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002253
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002254- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2255 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2256
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002257- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2258 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2259
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002260- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2261 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2262 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2263 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2264
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002265- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2266 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002267 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002268 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2269 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002270
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002271- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2272
2273
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002274Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002275-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002276
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002277- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002278 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002279 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2280 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2281
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002282- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2283 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2284
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002285- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2286 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2287 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2288 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2289
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002290- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2291 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2292 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2293
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002294- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2295
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002296- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2297
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002298- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2299 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2300 that are still imported into string.py).
2301
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002302- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2303
2304- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2305 Now it does.
2306
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002307- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2308
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002309- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2310 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2311 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2312 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2313 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002314 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2315 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002316
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002317- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2318 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2319 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2320 'help(object)'.
2321
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002322Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002323-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002324
2325- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002326 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002327 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2328 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2329
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002330- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002331 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2332 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002333
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002334C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002335-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002336
2337- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2338 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002339
2340----
2341
2342**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**