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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +000015- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
16 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
17
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +000018- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
19 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
20
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +000021- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
22 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
23 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
24 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
25 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
26 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
27 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
28 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
29 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
30 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
31 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
32 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
33 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +000034
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +000035- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
36 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
37 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
38 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
39 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
40
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +000041- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
42 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
43
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +000044- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
45 It's writable again.
46
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +000047- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
48 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
49 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
50 preferred, then __iter__ can be overriden.
51
Neil Schemenauer4e3363e2003-06-09 18:42:19 +000052- Creating an attribute on a module (i.e. a global variable created by
53 __setattr__) that causes a builtin name to be shadowed now raises a
54 DeprecationWarning. In future versions of Python the effect may be
55 undefined (in order to allow for optimization of global and builtin
56 name lookups).
57
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000058Extension modules
59-----------------
60
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +000061- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
62 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
63 unique within a single program run.
64
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +000065- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
66 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
67
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +000068- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
69 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
70
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +000071- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
72 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +000073
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +000074- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
75
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +000076- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
77 Fixes SF bug #730685.
78
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +000079- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
80 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
81 for many BSD-derived systems.
82
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000083Library
84-------
85
Raymond Hettingerc0fac962003-06-27 22:25:03 +000086- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
87 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
88 in the archive.
89
Raymond Hettinger6f3eaa62003-06-27 21:43:39 +000090- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
91 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
92
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +000093- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
94 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
95 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
96 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
97 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
98 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
99 argument.
100
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000101- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
102 569574).
103
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000104- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
105 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
106 no more.
107
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000108- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
109 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
110 module. A function registered with the threading module will
111 be used for all threads it creates.
112
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000113- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
114 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
115 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000116 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000117
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000118- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
119
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000120- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
121 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
122 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
123 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
124
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000125- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
126 handling.
127
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000128- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
129 __doc__ of data descriptors.
130
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000131- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
132 in socket.py.
133
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000134- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
135
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000136- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
137 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
138 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
139 opener with proxy support.
140
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000141Tools/Demos
142-----------
143
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000144- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
145
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000146- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
147
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000148- diff.py is a new script for print file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff
149 formats. Provides an alternate command line interface to difflib.py.
150
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000151- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
152 files.
153
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000154Build
155-----
156
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000157- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows to specify a
158 different root directory.
159
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000160C API
161-----
162
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000163- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
164 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
165 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
166 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
167 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
168 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
169 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
170 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
171 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
172 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
173
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000174New platforms
175-------------
176
177None this time.
178
179Tests
180-----
181
182- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
183 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
184
185Windows
186-------
187
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000188- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
189
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000190- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
191 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
192 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
193 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
194 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
195 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
196 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
197 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
198 that's what it's for.
199
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000200Mac
201---
202
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000203- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
204 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
205 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
206 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000207- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
208 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
209- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000210
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000211What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
212================================
213
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000214*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000215
216Core and builtins
217-----------------
218
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000219- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
220 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
221
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000222- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
223 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
224 and cannot be strings).
225
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000226- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
227 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
228 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
229 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
230
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000231- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
232 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
233 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
234 Python itself.
235
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000236- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
237 the referenced object, if it has one.
238
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000239- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
240 the thread started at
241 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
242
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000243- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
244 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
245 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
246 placed on a list index.
247
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000248- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
249 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
250 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
251 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
252
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000253- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
254 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
255 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
256 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
257 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
258 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
259 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
260
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000261- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
262 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
263 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
264 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
265 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
266
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000267- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
268 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000269
270- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
271 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
272 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
273 #693195.)
274
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000275- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
276 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000277
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000278- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000279 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000280 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
281 interpreter executions, would fail.
282
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000283- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000284 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000285 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000286
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000287Extension modules
288-----------------
289
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000290- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
291 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
292 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
293 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
294
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000295- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
296 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
297
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000298- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
299 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
300 and Greg Chapman.)
301
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000302- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
303 recursively.
304
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000305- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000306 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
307 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
308 leaks.
309
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000310- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
311
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000312- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
313 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
314 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
315 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
316 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
317 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
318 #705836.
319
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000320- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
321 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
322
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000323- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
324 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
325 See SF bug #692416.
326
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000327- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
328 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
329
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000330- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
331 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
332 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000333
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000334- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000335 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
336 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
337
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000338- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
339 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
340 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
341 timeouts to work properly.
342
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000343Library
344-------
345
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000346- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
347 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
348 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
349 future release.
350
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000351- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
352 for querying platform dependent features.
353
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000354- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000355
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000356- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
357 pickle protocol versions.
358
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000359- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
360 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
361 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
362
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000363- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
364
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000365- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
366 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
367 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
368 modules.
369
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000370- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
371 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
372 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
373
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000374- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
375 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
376
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000377- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
378 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
379 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
380
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000381- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000382 MS Office extensions.
383
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000384- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
385 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
386
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000387- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
388 execution speed of expressions and statements.
389
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000390- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
391 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
392 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
393 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
394 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
395 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
396
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000397- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
398 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
399 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000400
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000401- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
402 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
403 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
404
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000405- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
406
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000407- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
408 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
409 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
410
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000411Tools/Demos
412-----------
413
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000414- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
415 See the module docstring for details.
416
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000417Build
418-----
419
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000420- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
421 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000422
423C API
424-----
425
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000426- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
427
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000428- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
429 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
430 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
431
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000432- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
433 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000434
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000435 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
436 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
437 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000438
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000439- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000440 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
441
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000442- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
443 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
444 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000445
446New platforms
447-------------
448
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000449None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000450
451Tests
452-----
453
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000454- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
455 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000456
457Windows
458-------
459
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000460- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
461 function.
462
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000463- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
464 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000465
466Mac
467---
468
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000469- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
470 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000471
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000472- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
473 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000474
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000475- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
476 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
477 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000478
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000479- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000480 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
481 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000482
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000483- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
484 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000485
486
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000487What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
488=================================
489
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000490*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000491
492Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000493-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000494
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000495- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
496 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
497 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
498
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000499- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
500 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
501 (SF patch #664376.)
502
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000503- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
504 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
505 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
506 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
507 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
508 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000509 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000510
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000511- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
512 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
513 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
514 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000515 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000516
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000517- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
518 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
519 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
520 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
521 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
522 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
523 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
524 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
525 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
526 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
527 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
528
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000529- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
530 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
531 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
532 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
533 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
534 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
535
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000536- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
537 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
538
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000539- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
540 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
541 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
542 case.)
543
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000544- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
545 passed as unicode strings.
546
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000547- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
548 See SF bug #683467.
549
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000550- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
551 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
552
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000553- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
554
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000555- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
556
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000557- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
558 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
559 arguments.
560
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000561- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
562 See SF bug #667147.
563
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000564- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000565 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000566 See SF bug #676155.
567
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000568- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000569 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000570 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
571 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
572 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
573 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
574 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
575 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000576
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000577Extension modules
578-----------------
579
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000580- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
581 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
582 tp_as_number pointer.
583
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000584- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
585 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
586 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
587 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
588 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
589
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000590- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
591
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000592- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
593
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000594- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000595 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000596 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
597 patch #678531.)
598
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000599- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
600 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
601
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000602- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
603 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
604
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000605- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
606
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000607- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
608 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
609 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
610
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000611- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
612
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000613- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
614 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
615
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000616- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000617
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000618- datetime changes:
619
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000620 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
621
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000622 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
623 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
624 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
625 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
626 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
627 now.
628
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000629 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000630 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
631 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000632
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000633 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000634 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000635 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
636 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
637 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
638 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000639
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000640 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
641 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
642 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000643 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
644
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000645 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
646 by a later example coded by Guido.
647
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000648 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000649 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
650 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
651 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000652 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
653 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
654
655 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
656 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
657 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
658 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
659 tzinfo subclass instance.
660
661 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
662 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
663 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
664 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
665 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
666 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
667 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
668 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000669
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000670 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
671 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
672 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
673 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
674 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000675 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
676
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000677 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000678
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000679 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
680 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
681 as a naive datetime object.
682
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000683 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
684 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
685 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
686
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000687 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
688 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
689 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
690 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
691 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
692 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
693 comparison.
694
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000695 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
696 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
697 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
698 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000699 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000700
701 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000702
703 and ::
704
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000705 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
706
707 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
708 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
709 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
710 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
711
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000712 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
713 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
714 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
715 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
716 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
717
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000718 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
719 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000720 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
721 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000722
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000723Library
724-------
725
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000726- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
727 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
728
729- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
730 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
731 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
732 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
733 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
734 See PEP 307 for details.
735
736- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
737 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
738
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000739- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
740 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000741 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000742 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
743 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000744 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000745
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000746- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
747 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
748
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000749- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
750 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
751 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
752
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000753- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
754
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000755- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
756 exception.
757
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000758- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
759 class.
760
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000761- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
762 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
763 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
764
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000765- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
766 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
767
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000768- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000769 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
770 See SF bug #659228.
771
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000772- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
773 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
774 See SF patch #651082.
775
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000776- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000777
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000778- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
779 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
780
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000781- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000782 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000783
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000784- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
785 DOS paths from other platforms.
786
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000787Tools/Demos
788-----------
789
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000790- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
791 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
792 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
793 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
794 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
795 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
796 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
797 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
798 example:
799
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000800 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
801 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000802
803 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
804
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000805
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000806Build
807-----
808
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000809- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
810 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
811 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000812 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
813
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000814 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
815
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000816- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
817 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
818 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
819 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
820 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
821 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
822 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
823 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
824 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
825
826- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
827 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
828 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
829 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
830
831- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
832 from the Tools/scripts directory.
833
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000834C API
835-----
836
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000837- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
838 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000839
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000840- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
841 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
842 tp_as_number pointer.
843
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000844- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
845 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
846 (SF #681367)
847
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000848- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
849 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
850 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
851 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000852
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000853Tests
854-----
855
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000856- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000857 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
858 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
859 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
860 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
861 pydoc.)
862
863- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
864
865- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000866
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000867Windows
868-------
869
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000870- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
871 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
872 time).
873
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000874- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
875 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
876
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000877- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
878 release without strong cryptography.
879
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000880- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000881 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000882
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000883- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
884 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
885
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000886Mac
887---
888
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000889- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
890 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000891
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000892- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
893 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
894 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000895
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000896- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
897 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000898
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000899- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
900 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
901 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
902 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000903
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000904- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000905 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
906 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
907 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000908
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000909
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000910What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000911=================================
912
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000913*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000914
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000915Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000916--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000917
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000918- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
919
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000920- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
921 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000922 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000923 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000924 a different meaning than before.
925
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000926- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000927 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000928 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000929
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000930- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000931 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000932 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000933
934- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
935 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
936 and deallocation.
937
938- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
939 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
940
941- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
942 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
943 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
944 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
945 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
946
947- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
948 now detected by the garbage collector.
949
950- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
951 [SF bug 519621]
952
953- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
954 identifier.
955
956- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
957 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
958 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
959 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
960 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
961 [SF bug 563060]
962
963- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
964 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
965 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
966 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
967 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
968
969- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
970 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
971 not called. [SF bug #537450]
972
973- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
974
975- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
976 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
977 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
978 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
979 state of the slots would be lost.)
980
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000981Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000982-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000983
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000984- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000985 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
986 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
987 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
988 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000989 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
990 Jython 2.1.
991
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000992- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000993 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000994 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
995 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
996 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
997 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
998 these, see PEP 302.
999
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001000- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1001 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1002 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1003
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001004- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1005 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1006 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1007
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001008- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1009 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1010 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1011
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001012- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1013 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1014 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1015 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1016 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1017 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1018 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1019 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1020 releases or implementations.
1021
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001022- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001023 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1024 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001025
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001026- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1027 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1028
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001029- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1030 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1031 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1032
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001033- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1034 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1035
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001036- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1037 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001038 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1039 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001040
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001041- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1042 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1043 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1044 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1045 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1046
1047 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1048 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1049 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1050 pattern.
1051
1052 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1053 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1054 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1055 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1056
1057 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1058 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1059 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1060 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1061 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1062 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1063
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001064- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1065 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1066 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1067 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1068 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1069 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1070 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1071 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001072
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001073- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1074 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1075 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1076 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1077 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001078 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1079 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1080 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1081 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1082 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1083 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1084 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001085
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001086- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1087 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1088
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001089- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1090 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1091 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1092 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1093 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1094 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1095 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1096 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1097 to Zack Weinberg!
1098
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001099- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1100 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1101 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1102 type. This has been fixed now.
1103
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001104- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1105 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1106 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1107
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001108- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1109 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1110 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1111 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1112 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1113 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1114 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1115 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001116 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001117
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001118- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1119 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1120 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001121
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001122- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1123 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1124 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1125 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1126 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1127 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1128 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1129 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001130 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001131 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1132 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1133
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001134- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1135 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1136 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1137 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1138 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1139 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1140 this.)
1141
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001142- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1143 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001144 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001145 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001146 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1147 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001148 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1149 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001150
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001151- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1152 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1153 currently running.
1154
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001155- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1156 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1157 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1158 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1159
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001160- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1161 as directory names.
1162
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001163- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1164 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1165
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001166- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1167 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1168
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001169- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001170 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1171 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001172
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001173- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1174 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1175 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1176 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1177 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1178
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001179- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1180 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1181 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1182 removed.
1183
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001184- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1185 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1186 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1187
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001188- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1189 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1190 to __debug__.
1191
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001192- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1193 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1194 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1195
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001196- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1197 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1198 deprecated now.
1199
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001200- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1201 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1202 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001203
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001204- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1205 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1206 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1207 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1208 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001209
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001210- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1211 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1212
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001213- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1214 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1215 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001216 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001217 is backward compatible.
1218
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001219- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1220 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1221 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1222 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1223 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1224
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001225- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1226 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1227 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1228 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1229 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1230 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001231
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001232- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1233 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1234
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001235- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1236 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1237
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001238- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1239 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1240 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1241 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1242 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1243
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001244- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1245 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1246 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1247
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001248- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001249 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1250
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001251- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1252 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1253 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001254
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001255- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1256 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1257
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001258- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1259 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1260 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1261
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001262- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1263
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001264Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001265-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001266
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001267- Added three operators to the operator module:
1268 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1269 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1270 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1271
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001272- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1273
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001274- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1275 archives.
1276
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001277- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1278 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1279 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1280
1281 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1282
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001283- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1284 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1285 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001286 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001287
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001288- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1289 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1290 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1291 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001292 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1293 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1294 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1295 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001296
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001297- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1298 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001299
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001300- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1301
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001302- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1303 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1304
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001305- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1306 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1307 supported.
1308
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001309- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1310
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001311- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1312 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001313
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001314- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1315 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1316
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001317- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1318
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001319- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1320 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1321
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001322- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1323 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1324 functions but callable type objects.
1325
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001326- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001327 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001328 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001329
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001330- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1331 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001332
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001333- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1334 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001335
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001336- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1337 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1338 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1339 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1340
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001341- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1342 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001343
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001344- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1345 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1346 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1347 and __imul__.
1348
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001349- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001350 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1351 is called.
1352
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001353- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1354 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1355 interpreter was compiled.
1356
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001357- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1358 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1359 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001360 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001361 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1362 1, not 2.
1363
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001364- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1365 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1366 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1367 limit.
1368
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001369- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1370 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1371 bug #623464.
1372
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001373- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1374 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1375 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1376 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1377
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001378Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001379-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001380
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001381- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1382
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001383- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1384 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1385 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1386 with Python 2.3a2.
1387
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001388- os.path exposes getctime.
1389
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001390- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001391 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001392 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001393 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001394 unit tests of floating point results.
1395
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001396- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1397 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1398 has been increased.
1399
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001400- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1401 executed.
1402
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001403- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1404 postinstallation script.
1405
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001406- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1407 test the current module.
1408
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001409- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001410 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1411 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1412 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1413 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1414
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001415- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001416 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001417 Ward's Optik package.
1418
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001419- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1420 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1421 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1422 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1423
1424- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1425 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001426 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001427
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001428- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1429 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1430 shelf are binary pickles.
1431
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001432- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1433 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1434
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001435- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1436 modules are iterators now.
1437
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001438- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1439 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1440 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1441 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1442 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1443 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001444
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001445- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1446 with their entity value.
1447
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001448- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1449
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001450- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1451 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001452
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001453- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1454 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001455 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001456
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001457- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1458 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1459 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1460 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1461 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1462 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1463 main():
1464
1465 import locale
1466 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1467
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001468- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1469 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1470
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001471- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1472 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1473 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1474 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1475 to the new standard.
1476
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001477- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1478 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1479 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1480 an extension to the database.
1481
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001482- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1483 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1484 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1485 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001486 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001487
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001488- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001489 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001490
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001491- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1492 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1493 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1494 bounded integers.
1495
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001496- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1497 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1498 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1499 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1500 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1501 in existence.
1502
1503 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1504 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1505 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1506 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1507 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1508 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1509
1510 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1511 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1512 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1513 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1514
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001515- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1516 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1517 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1518
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001519- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1520
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001521- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1522 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1523 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1524 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1525
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001526- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1527 argument.
1528
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001529- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1530 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1531 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1532 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1533 [SF patch 560794].
1534
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001535- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1536 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1537 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001538 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1539 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1540 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001541
1542- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1543 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001544
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001545- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1546 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1547 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1548 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001549
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001550- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1551 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1552 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1553 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1554 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1555
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001556- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001557
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001558- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1559
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001560- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1561 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1562 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1563 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1564 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1565 identical to None.
1566
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001567- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1568 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1569 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1570 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1571 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1572 results now.
1573
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001574- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1575 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1576
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001577- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1578 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1579 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1580 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1581 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1582 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1583 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1584 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1585
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001586- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1587
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001588- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1589 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1590
1591- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1592 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1593 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1594 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1595 and other systems.
1596
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001597- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1598 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1599 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1600 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 +00001601 work well with these.
1602
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001603- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1604
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001605- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001606 connections.
1607
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001608- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1609 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1610 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1611
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001612- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1613 sets
1614
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001615- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1616 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1617 name.
1618
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001619- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1620 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1621 passed in.
1622
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001623- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001624 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001625 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1626 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001627
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001628- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1629
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001630- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1631
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001632- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1633 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1634 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1635
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001636- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1637 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1638 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1639 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001640 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001641
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001642- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001643 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001644 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001645
1646- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1647 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1648 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1649
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001650- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001651 the value of its expression argument.
1652
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001653- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1654 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1655 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1656
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001657- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1658 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1659 skipstone browser was included.
1660
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001661- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1662 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1663
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001664Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001665-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001666
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001667- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1668 names in addition to accepting file names.
1669
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001670- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1671 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1672 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1673 still used and useful.)
1674
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001675- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1676 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1677 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1678 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001679
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001680- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1681 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1682 the generated binary.
1683
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001684Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001685-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001686
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001687- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1688
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001689- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1690 except in the hands of experts.
1691
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001692- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001693 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1694 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1695 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001696
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001697- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1698 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1699 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1700 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1701 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1702 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1703 builds.
1704
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001705- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1706 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1707 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1708 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1709 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1710 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1711 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1712 new type.
1713
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001714- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001715
1716 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1717 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1718 positive infinities.
1719
1720 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1721 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1722 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1723 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1724 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1725 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1726 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1727
1728 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1729
1730 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1731
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001732- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1733 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1734 size of the executable.
1735
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001736- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1737 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1738 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1739 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001740
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001741- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1742
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001743- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1744 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1745 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001746
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001747- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1748 well as Unix.
1749
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001750- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1751 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1752 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1753 modules in the README file for details.
1754
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001755C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001756-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001757
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001758- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1759 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001760 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001761 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001762 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001763
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001764- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1765 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1766 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1767 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1768 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1769 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001770 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001771 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1772 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1773 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1774 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1775 aligned.)
1776
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001777- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1778 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1779 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1780
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001781- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1782 level.
1783
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001784- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1785 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1786 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1787 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1788 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1789
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001790- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1791 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1792 code.
1793
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001794- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1795 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1796 adjusting for negative indices.
1797
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001798- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1799 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1800 object.
1801
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001802- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1803 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1804 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1805
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001806- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1807 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001808
1809- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1810
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001811- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1812 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1813 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1814 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1815
1816- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1817
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001818- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001819
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001820- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001821 without going through the buffer API.
1822
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001823- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001824
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001825- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1826 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1827 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1828 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1829
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001830- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1831 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1832
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001833- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001834 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1835
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001836New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001837-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001838
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001839- OpenVMS is now supported.
1840
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001841- AtheOS is now supported.
1842
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001843- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1844
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001845- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1846
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001847Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001848-----
1849
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001850- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1851 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1852 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001853
1854Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001855-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001856
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001857- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1858 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1859 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1860 bugs.
1861 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001862 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001863 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1864 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001865 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001866
1867- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001868 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001869
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001870- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1871 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1872
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001873- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1874 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001875 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001876 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1877
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001878- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1879 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1880 use files" uninstall option).
1881
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001882- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1883
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001884- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1885 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1886
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001887- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1888 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1889 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1890
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001891- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1892 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1893 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1894 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1895 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001896 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1897 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1898 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001899
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001900- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001901 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001902 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1903 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1904 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1905 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1906 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1907 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1908 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1909 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1910 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1911 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1912 work around.
1913
1914- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1915 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1916 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1917 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1918 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1919 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1920 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1921 specified with O_CREAT too).
1922
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001923Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001924----
1925
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001926- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001927
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001928- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1929 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1930 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1931
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001932- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1933 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1934 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1935
1936- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1937 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1938 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1939 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1940 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1941 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1942 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1943 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001944
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001945- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1946 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1947 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001948
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001949- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1950 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1951 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1952 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1953 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001954
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001955- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1956 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1957 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001958
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001959- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1960 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001961
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001962- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1963 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1964 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1965 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1966 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001967
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001968- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1969 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1970 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1971
1972- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1973 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1974 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001975
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001976- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1977 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1978 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1979 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001980 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001981
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001982- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1983 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001984
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001985- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1986 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001987
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001988- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001989 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001990 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1991 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001992
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001993
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001994What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001995===============================
1996
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001997*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1998
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001999Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002000--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002001
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002002- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2003 with a custom metaclass.
2004
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002005Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002006-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002007
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002008- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2009 are proxies.
2010
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002011Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002012-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002013
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002014- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2015 very short strings.
2016
2017- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2018 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2019 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2020 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2021 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2022
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002023Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002024-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002025
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002026- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2027 close or delete time).
2028
2029- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2030 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2031
2032- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2033
2034- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002035 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002036
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002037Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002038-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002039
2040Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002041-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002042
2043C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002044-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002045
2046New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002047-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002048
2049Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002050-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002051
2052Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002053-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002054
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002055- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2056
2057- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2058 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2059
2060- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2061 deleted at process exit time.
2062
2063- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2064 in backslash.
2065
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002066Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002067----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002068
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002069- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2070 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2071 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2072
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002073
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002074What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002075===========================
2076
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002077*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2078
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002079Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002080--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002081
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002082- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2083 been extensively updated. See
2084
2085 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2086
2087 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2088
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002089- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2090 deleted!
2091
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002092- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2093 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2094 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2095 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2096 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2097
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002098- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2099
2100 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2101 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2102
2103 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2104 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2105 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2106 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2107 supported anyway.
2108
2109 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2110 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2111
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002112- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2113 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2114 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2115 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2116 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002117
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002118- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2119 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2120 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2121
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002122Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002123-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002124
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002125- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2126 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2127 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2128 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2129 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2130 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002131 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2132 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2133 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2134 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002135
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002136- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2137 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2138 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2139
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002140Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002141-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002142
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002143- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2144
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002145Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002146-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002147
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002148- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2149 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2150 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2151 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2152 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2153 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2154
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002155- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2156
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002157- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2158
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002159- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2160
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002161- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2162 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2163 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2164
2165- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2166
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002167Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002168-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002169
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002170- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2171 off a search on Google.
2172
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002173Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002174-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002175
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002176- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2177 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2178 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2179 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2180 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2181 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2182 other platforms should do likewise.
2183
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002184- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2185 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2186 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2187
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002188C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002189-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002190
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002191- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2192 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2193 producing key-value pairs.
2194
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002195- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002196 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002197 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2198 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2199 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2200 previously went unchallenged.
2201
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002202New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002203-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002204
2205Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002206-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002207
2208Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002209-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002210
2211Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002212----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002213
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002214- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2215 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002216
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002217- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2218 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2219 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2220 home.
2221
2222
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002223What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002224===========================
2225
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002226*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2227
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002228Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002229--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002230
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002231- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2232 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002233
2234 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002235 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002236
2237 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2238 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002239 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002240 This needs to be documented.
2241
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002242- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2243 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2244
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002245- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2246 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2247 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2248
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002249- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2250 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2251
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002252- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2253 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2254 class forbids it).
2255
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002256- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2257 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2258 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2259
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002260- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2261
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002262Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002263-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002264
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002265- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2266 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002267 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002268
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002269- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2270 (like 1 + '').
2271
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002272Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002273-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002274
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002275- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2276 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2277 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2278 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002279 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002280 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2281
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002282- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2283 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2284 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2285 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2286
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002287- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2288 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002289 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2290 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2291 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002292
2293- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2294 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002295
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002296- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2297 bytes on its input.
2298
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002299Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002300-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002301
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002302- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002303 convenience function.
2304
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002305- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2306 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2307 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002308 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2309 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2310 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2311 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2312 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2313 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002314
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002315- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2316 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2317 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2318 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2319
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002320- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2321 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2322 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2323
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002324- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2325 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2326 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2327 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2328
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002329- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2330 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002331 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002332 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2333 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2334 new -l and -e options.
2335
2336- statcache is now deprecated.
2337
2338- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2339 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002340 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002341 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2342 time properly taken into account.
2343
2344- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2345 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2346 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2347 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2348
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002349Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002350-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002351
2352Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002353-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002354
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002355- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2356 is built with libdb3 if available.
2357
2358- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2359
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002360C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002361-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002362
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002363- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2364 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2365 PySequence_Size().
2366
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002367- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2368
2369- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2370 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2371 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2372
2373- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2374 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2375
2376- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2377 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2378
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002379New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002380-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002381
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002382- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2383 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2384
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002385- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2386 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2387
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002388- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2389
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002390Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002391-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002392
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002393- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2394 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2395
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002396Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002397-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002398
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002399Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002400----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002401
2402- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2403 removed completely in the next release.
2404
2405- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2406 OSX.
2407
2408- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2409 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2410
2411- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2412
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002413
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002414What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002415===========================
2416
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002417*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2418
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002419Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002420--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002421
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002422- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002423 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002424 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002425 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2426 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002427 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2428 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002429 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2430 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002431
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002432- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2433 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2434
2435- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2436 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2437
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002438Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002439-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002440
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002441- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2442 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2443 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2444 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2445 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2446 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2447 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2448 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2449
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002450- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2451 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2452 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2453 example).
2454
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002455- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002456 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002457 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002458 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002459
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002460- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2461 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2462 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002463 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002464
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002465- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2466 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2467 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2468 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2469 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2470 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2471
2472 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2473
2474 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2475
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002476Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002477-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002478
2479- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2480
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002481- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2482
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002483- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2484 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002485
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002486- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2487 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2488 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2489 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2490 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2491 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002492 attributes.
2493
2494- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2495 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2496 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002497
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002498- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2499 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2500 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002501
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002502- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2503 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2504 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002505 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2506 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2507
2508- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2509 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002510
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002511Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002512-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002513
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002514- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2515 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2516
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002517- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2518 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2519 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2520 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2521
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002522- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2523 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2524 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2525 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2526
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002527 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2528 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2529 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2530 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2531 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2532 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2533 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2534 without losing information).
2535
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002536- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002537 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2538 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2539 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2540 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2541 module).
2542
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002543 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002544 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2545 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2546 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2547 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002548
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002549- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002550 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2551 encoding.
2552
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002553- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2554 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2555
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002556- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002557 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2558
2559- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2560 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2561 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2562 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2563
2564- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2565
2566- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2567 ON, and OFF.
2568
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002569- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2570 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2571
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002572Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002573-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002574
2575- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2576 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2577 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002578
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002579- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2580 been added: -X and -E.
2581
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002582Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002583-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002584
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002585- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2586 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2587
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002588C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002589-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002590
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002591- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2592 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2593 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2594 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2595 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2596
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002597- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2598 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2599 as long) arguments.
2600
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002601- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2602 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2603 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2604 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2605 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2606 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2607
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002608- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2609 input.
2610
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002611New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002612-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002613
2614Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002615-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002616
2617Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002618-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002619
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002620- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2621 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2622 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2623
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002624- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2625 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2626 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002627 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002628
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002629 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2630 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2631 import signal
2632 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002633
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002634 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002635 while 1:
2636 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002637 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002638 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2639 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2640 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2641 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002642
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002643
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002644What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2645===========================
2646
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002647*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2648
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002649Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002650--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002651
2652- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2653 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2654 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2655
2656- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2657 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2658 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2659 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2660 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2661 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2662 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002663
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002664- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002665 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002666 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2667 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2668 associate a docstring with a property.
2669
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002670- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2671 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2672 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2673 other built-in object types.
2674
2675- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2676 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2677 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2678 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2679 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2680
2681- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2682 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2683
2684- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2685 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002686 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002687 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2688 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2689 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2690 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2691 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2692
2693- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2694 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2695 class.
2696
2697- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2698 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2699 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2700 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2701
2702- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2703 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2704 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2705 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2706
2707- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2708 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2709
2710- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2711 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2712 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2713 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2714 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002715 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002716 with the same value as s.
2717
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002718- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2719
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002720Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002721----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002722
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002723- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2724
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002725- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2726 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2727 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2728 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2729 objects.
2730
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002731- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2732 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002733 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2734 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2735
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002736- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2737 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2738 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2739
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002740Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002741-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002742
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002743- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2744 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2745 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2746 by the instances.
2747
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002748- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2749 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2750 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2751
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002752- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2753 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2754 before the entire comparison is complete.
2755
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002756- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2757 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2758 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2759
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002760- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2761 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2762 getwriter().
2763
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002764- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2765 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2766
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002767- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002768 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2769 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2770
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002771- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2772 iterable object.
2773
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002774- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2775 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002776
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002777- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2778 authentication.
2779
2780- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2781 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002782
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002783- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002784 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2785 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2786 a sample driver.)
2787
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002788Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002790
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002791- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2792 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2793 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2794 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2795 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2796 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2797 kernel has large file support.
2798
2799- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2800 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2801 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2802 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2803 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2804
2805- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2806 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2807 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2808
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002809C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002810-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002811
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002812- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2813 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2814
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002815New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002816-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002817
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002818- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2819 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2820
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002821Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002822-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002823
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002824- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2825 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2826 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2827 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2828 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2829
2830- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2831 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2832 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2833 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2834
2835- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2836 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2837
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002838Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002839-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002840
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002841- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002842 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2843 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002844
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002845
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002846What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2847===========================
2848
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002849*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2850
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002851Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002852----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002853
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002854- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2855 big to represent as a C double.
2856
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002857- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2858 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2859 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2860 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2861 restriction).
2862
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002863- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2864 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2865 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2866 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2867 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2868
2869 >>> dir([])
2870 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2871 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2872 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2873 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2874 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2875 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2876 'reverse', 'sort']
2877
2878 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2879
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002880- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002881 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2882 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2883 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2884 OverflowError exception.
2885
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002886- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002887 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002888 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2889 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2890 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2891 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2892 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002893 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002894 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2895 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2896
2897 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2898 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2899 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2900 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002901
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002902- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002903 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2904 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2905 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2906 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2907 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2908 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2909 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2910 once it is created.
2911
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002912- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2913 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2914 (key, value) pairs.
2915
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002916- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002917 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2918 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2919
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002920- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2921 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2922 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2923 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2924 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002925
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002926- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002927 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2928 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2929
2930 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2931
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002932- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002933 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2934
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002935Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002936-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002937
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002938- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002939 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2940 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002941
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002942- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2943 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2944 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2945 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2946 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2947 in this area anymore).
2948
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002949- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2950 threading.Timer.
2951
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002952- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2953 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2954
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002955- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002956 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2957
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002958- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002959 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2960 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2961 converted to Python longs.
2962
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002963- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002964 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2965
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002966- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2967 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2968 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2969
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002970Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002971-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002972
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002973- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2974 division operators as per PEP 238.
2975
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002976Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002977-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002978
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002979- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2980 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2981 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2982 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2983
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002984C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002985-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002986
2987- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002988
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002989- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2990 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002991 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002992
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002993 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2994 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002995 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002996 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002997
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002998- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002999 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3000 module:
3001
3002 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003003
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003004 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3005 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003006
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003007 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3008 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003009
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003010 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3011
3012 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3013
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003014- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003015 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3016 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3017 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003018
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003019New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003021
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003022- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3023 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3024 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3025 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3026 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003027
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003028Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003029-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003030
3031Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003032-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003033
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003034- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3035 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3036 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3037 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003038 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3039 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3040 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3041 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3042 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003043
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003044- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003045 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3046
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003047
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003048What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3049===========================
3050
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003051*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3052
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003053Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003055
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003056- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3057 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3058
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003059- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3060 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3061 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003062
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003063- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3064 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3065 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3066 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003067
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003068- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3069
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003070- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003071
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003072Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003073-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003074
3075- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003076 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003077 the module docstring for details.
3078
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003079Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003081
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003082- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003083 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3084 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3085 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003086
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003087- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3088 Nick Mathewson.
3089
3090Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003091----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003092
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003093- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3094 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3095 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3096 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3097 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3098 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3099 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3100 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3101
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003102- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3103 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3104 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3105 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3106
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003107- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3108 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3109 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3110 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3111 come a long way).
3112
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003113- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3114 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3115 write filters for these warnings).
3116
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003117- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3118 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3119 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3120 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3121 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3122
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003123- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3124 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3125 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3126 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3127 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3128 older distribution.
3129
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003130Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003132
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003133- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3134 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003135 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003136
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003137- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3138 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3139 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3140
3141- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3142
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003143- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3144
3145- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3146
3147- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3148
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003149- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003150
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003151- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3152
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003153New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003154-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003155
3156C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003157-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003158
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003159- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3160 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3161 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3162 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3163 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3164 against buffer overruns.
3165
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003166- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003167 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3168 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003169 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3170 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3171 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3172
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003173- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3174 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3175 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3176 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3177 deprecated.
3178
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003179Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003181
3182- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3183 relevant is found.
3184
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003185
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003186What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003187===========================
3188
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003189*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3190
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003191Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003192----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003193
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003194- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3195 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3196 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3197 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3198 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3199 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3200 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3201 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003202 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003203 repaired.
3204
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003205- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003206 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003207 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3208 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3209 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3210 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3211 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3212 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3213 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3214 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3215
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003216- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3217 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3218 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3219 leading BMO character).
3220
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003221- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3222 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3223 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3224
3225 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3226 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3227 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003228
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003229 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3230 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3231 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3232 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3233 for various simple to use conversions.
3234
3235 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3236 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3237
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003238 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3239 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3240 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3241 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3242 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3243 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3244 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3245 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3246 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3247 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3248 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3249 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3250 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3251 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3252 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003253
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003254- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3255 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3256 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003257 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003258 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003259
3260 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003261 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3262 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3263 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3264 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3265 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003266 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3267 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003268
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003269 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3270 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3271 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003272 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003273
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003274- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3275 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3276 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3277 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3278 floating arithmetic,
3279
3280 x = 9007199254740992.0
3281 print long(x)
3282
3283 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3284 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3285 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3286 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3287 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3288 functions are of good quality).
3289
3290 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3291 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3292 algorithms to break.
3293
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003294- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3295 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3296 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3297 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3298 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3299 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3300 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3301 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3302 order.
3303
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003304- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3305 operation along the most common code paths.
3306
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003307- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3308 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3309
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003310- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3311 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3312 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3313 {}.update(UserDict())
3314
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003315- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3316 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3317 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3318 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3319 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3320 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3321 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3322 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3323
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003324- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003325 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003327 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003328 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3329 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003330 join() method of strings
3331 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003332 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3333 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003334 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003335 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003336
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003337- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3338 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3339
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003340- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3341 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3342
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003343- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3344 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3345 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3346 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3347
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003348- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3349 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003350 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003351 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3352 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003353
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003354- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3355
3356
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003357Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003358-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003359
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003360- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003361 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003362 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3363 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3364
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003365- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3366 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3367
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003368- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3369 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3370 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3371 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3372
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003373- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3374 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3375 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3376
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003377- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3378
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003379- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3380
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003381- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3382 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3383 that are still imported into string.py).
3384
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003385- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3386
3387- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3388 Now it does.
3389
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003390- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3391
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003392- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3393 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3394 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3395 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3396 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003397 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3398 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003399
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003400- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3401 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3402 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3403 'help(object)'.
3404
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003405Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003407
3408- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003409 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003410 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3411 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3412
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003413- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003414 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3415 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003416
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003417C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003418-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003419
3420- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3421 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422
3423----
3424
3425**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**