blob: 5cc7ce8972a0d7e7becd3a663f1e182c9b158e6d [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +000015- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
16 the referenced object, if it has one.
17
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +000018- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
19 the thread started at
20 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
21
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +000022- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
23 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
24 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
25 placed on a list index.
26
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +000027- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
28 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
29 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
30 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
31
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000032- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
33 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
34 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
35 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
36 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
37 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
38 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
39
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000040- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
41 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
42 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
43 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
44 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
45
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000046- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
47 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000048
49- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
50 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
51 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
52 #693195.)
53
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000054- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
55 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000056
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000057- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000058 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000059 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
60 interpreter executions, would fail.
61
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000062- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +000063 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +000064 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000065
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000066Extension modules
67-----------------
68
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +000069- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
70 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
71
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +000072- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
73 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
74 and Greg Chapman.)
75
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000076- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
77 recursively.
78
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +000079- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +000080 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
81 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
82 leaks.
83
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +000084- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
85
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +000086- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
87 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
88 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
89 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
90 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
91 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
92 #705836.
93
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +000094- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
95 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
96
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +000097- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
98 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
99 See SF bug #692416.
100
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000101- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
102 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
103
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000104- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
105 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
106 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000107
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000108- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
109 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
110 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
111 timeouts to work properly.
112
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000113Library
114-------
115
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000116- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
117 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
118 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
119
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000120- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
121 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
122
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000123- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
124 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
125 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
126
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000127- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000128 MS Office extensions.
129
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000130- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
131 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
132
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000133- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
134 execution speed of expressions and statements.
135
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000136- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
137 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
138 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
139 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
140 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
141 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
142
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000143- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
144 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
145 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000146
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000147- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
148 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
149 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
150
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000151- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
152
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000153Tools/Demos
154-----------
155
156TBD
157
158Build
159-----
160
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000161- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
162 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000163
164C API
165-----
166
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000167- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
168 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
169 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
170
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000171- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG.
172
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000173- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000174 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
175
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000176- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
177 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
178 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000179
180New platforms
181-------------
182
183TBD
184
185Tests
186-----
187
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000188- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
189 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000190
191Windows
192-------
193
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000194- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
195 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000196
197Mac
198---
199
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000200- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
201 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000202
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000203- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
204 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000205
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000206- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
207 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
208 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000209
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000210- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000211 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
212 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000213
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000214- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
215 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000216
217
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000218What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
219=================================
220
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000221*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000222
223Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000224-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000225
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000226- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
227 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
228 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
229
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000230- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
231 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
232 (SF patch #664376.)
233
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000234- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
235 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
236 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
237 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
238 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
239 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000240 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000241
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000242- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
243 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
244 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
245 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000246 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000247
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000248- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
249 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
250 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
251 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
252 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
253 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
254 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
255 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
256 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
257 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
258 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
259
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000260- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
261 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
262 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
263 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
264 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
265 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
266
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000267- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
268 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
269
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000270- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
271 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
272 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
273 case.)
274
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000275- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
276 passed as unicode strings.
277
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000278- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
279 See SF bug #683467.
280
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000281- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
282 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
283
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000284- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
285
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000286- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
287
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000288- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
289 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
290 arguments.
291
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000292- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
293 See SF bug #667147.
294
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000295- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000296 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000297 See SF bug #676155.
298
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000299- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000300 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000301 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
302 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
303 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
304 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
305 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
306 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000307
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000308Extension modules
309-----------------
310
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000311- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
312 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
313 tp_as_number pointer.
314
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000315- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
316 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
317 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
318 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
319 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
320
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000321- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
322
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000323- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
324
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000325- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000326 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000327 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
328 patch #678531.)
329
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000330- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
331 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
332
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000333- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
334 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
335
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000336- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
337
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000338- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
339 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
340 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
341
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000342- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
343
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000344- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
345 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
346
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000347- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000348
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000349- datetime changes:
350
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000351 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
352
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000353 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
354 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
355 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
356 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
357 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
358 now.
359
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000360 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000361 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
362 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000363
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000364 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000365 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000366 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
367 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
368 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
369 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000370
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000371 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
372 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
373 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000374 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
375
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000376 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
377 by a later example coded by Guido.
378
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000379 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000380 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
381 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
382 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000383 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
384 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
385
386 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
387 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
388 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
389 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
390 tzinfo subclass instance.
391
392 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
393 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
394 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
395 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
396 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
397 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
398 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
399 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000400
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000401 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
402 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
403 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
404 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
405 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000406 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
407
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000408 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000409
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000410 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
411 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
412 as a naive datetime object.
413
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000414 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
415 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
416 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
417
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000418 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
419 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
420 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
421 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
422 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
423 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
424 comparison.
425
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000426 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
427 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
428 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
429 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000430 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000431
432 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000433
434 and ::
435
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000436 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
437
438 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
439 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
440 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
441 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
442
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000443 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
444 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
445 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
446 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
447 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
448
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000449 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
450 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000451 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
452 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000453
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000454Library
455-------
456
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000457- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
458 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
459
460- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
461 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
462 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
463 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
464 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
465 See PEP 307 for details.
466
467- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
468 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
469
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000470- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
471 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000472 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000473 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
474 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000475 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000476
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000477- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
478 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
479
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000480- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
481 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
482 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
483
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000484- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
485
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000486- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
487 exception.
488
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000489- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
490 class.
491
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000492- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
493 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
494 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
495
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000496- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
497 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
498
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000499- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000500 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
501 See SF bug #659228.
502
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000503- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
504 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
505 See SF patch #651082.
506
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000507- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000508
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000509- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
510 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
511
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000512- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000513 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000514
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000515- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
516 DOS paths from other platforms.
517
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000518Tools/Demos
519-----------
520
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000521- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
522 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
523 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
524 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
525 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
526 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
527 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
528 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
529 example:
530
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000531 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
532 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000533
534 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
535
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000536
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000537Build
538-----
539
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000540- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
541 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
542 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000543 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
544
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000545 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
546
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000547- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
548 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
549 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
550 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
551 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
552 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
553 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
554 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
555 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
556
557- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
558 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
559 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
560 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
561
562- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
563 from the Tools/scripts directory.
564
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000565C API
566-----
567
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000568- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
569 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000570
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000571- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
572 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
573 tp_as_number pointer.
574
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000575- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
576 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
577 (SF #681367)
578
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000579- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
580 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
581 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
582 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000583
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000584Tests
585-----
586
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000587- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000588 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
589 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
590 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
591 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
592 pydoc.)
593
594- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
595
596- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000597
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000598Windows
599-------
600
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000601- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
602 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
603 time).
604
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000605- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
606 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
607
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000608- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
609 release without strong cryptography.
610
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000611- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000612 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000613
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000614- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
615 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
616
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000617Mac
618---
619
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000620- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
621 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000622
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000623- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
624 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
625 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000626
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000627- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
628 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000629
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000630- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
631 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
632 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
633 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000634
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000635- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000636 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
637 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
638 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000639
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000640
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000641What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000642=================================
643
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000644*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000645
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000646Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000647--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000648
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000649- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
650
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000651- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
652 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000653 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000654 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000655 a different meaning than before.
656
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000657- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000658 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000659 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000660
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000661- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000662 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000663 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000664
665- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
666 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
667 and deallocation.
668
669- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
670 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
671
672- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
673 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
674 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
675 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
676 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
677
678- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
679 now detected by the garbage collector.
680
681- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
682 [SF bug 519621]
683
684- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
685 identifier.
686
687- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
688 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
689 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
690 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
691 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
692 [SF bug 563060]
693
694- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
695 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
696 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
697 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
698 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
699
700- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
701 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
702 not called. [SF bug #537450]
703
704- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
705
706- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
707 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
708 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
709 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
710 state of the slots would be lost.)
711
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000712Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000713-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000714
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000715- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000716 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
717 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
718 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
719 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000720 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
721 Jython 2.1.
722
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000723- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000724 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000725 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
726 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
727 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
728 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
729 these, see PEP 302.
730
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000731- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
732 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
733 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
734
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000735- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
736 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
737 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
738
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000739- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
740 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
741 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
742
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000743- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
744 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
745 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
746 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
747 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
748 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
749 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
750 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
751 releases or implementations.
752
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000753- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000754 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
755 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000756
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000757- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
758 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
759
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000760- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
761 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
762 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
763
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000764- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
765 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
766
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000767- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
768 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000769 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
770 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000771
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000772- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
773 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
774 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
775 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
776 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
777
778 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
779 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
780 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
781 pattern.
782
783 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
784 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
785 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
786 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
787
788 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
789 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
790 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
791 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
792 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
793 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
794
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000795- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
796 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
797 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
798 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
799 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
800 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
801 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
802 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000803
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000804- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
805 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
806 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
807 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
808 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000809 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
810 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
811 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
812 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
813 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
814 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
815 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000816
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000817- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
818 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
819
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000820- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
821 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
822 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
823 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
824 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
825 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
826 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
827 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
828 to Zack Weinberg!
829
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000830- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
831 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
832 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
833 type. This has been fixed now.
834
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000835- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
836 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
837 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
838
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000839- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
840 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
841 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
842 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
843 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
844 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
845 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
846 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000847 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000848
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000849- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
850 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
851 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000852
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000853- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
854 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
855 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
856 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
857 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
858 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
859 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
860 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000861 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000862 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
863 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
864
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000865- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
866 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
867 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
868 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
869 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
870 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
871 this.)
872
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000873- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
874 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000875 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000876 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000877 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
878 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000879 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
880 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000881
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000882- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
883 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
884 currently running.
885
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000886- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
887 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
888 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
889 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
890
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000891- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
892 as directory names.
893
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000894- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
895 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
896
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000897- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
898 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
899
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000900- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000901 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
902 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000903
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000904- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
905 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
906 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
907 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
908 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
909
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000910- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
911 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
912 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
913 removed.
914
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000915- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
916 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
917 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
918
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000919- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
920 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
921 to __debug__.
922
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000923- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
924 string to the left with zeros. For example,
925 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
926
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000927- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
928 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
929 deprecated now.
930
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000931- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
932 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
933 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000934
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000935- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
936 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
937 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
938 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
939 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000940
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000941- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
942 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
943
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000944- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
945 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
946 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000947 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000948 is backward compatible.
949
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000950- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
951 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
952 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
953 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
954 could access a pointer to freed memory.
955
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000956- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
957 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
958 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
959 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
960 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
961 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000962
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000963- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
964 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
965
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000966- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
967 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
968
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000969- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
970 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
971 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
972 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
973 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
974
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000975- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
976 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
977 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
978
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000979- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000980 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
981
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000982- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
983 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
984 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000985
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000986- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
987 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
988
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000989- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
990 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
991 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
992
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000993- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
994
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000995Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000996-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000997
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000998- Added three operators to the operator module:
999 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1000 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1001 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1002
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001003- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1004
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001005- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1006 archives.
1007
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001008- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1009 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1010 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1011
1012 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1013
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001014- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1015 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1016 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001017 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001018
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001019- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1020 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1021 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1022 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001023 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1024 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1025 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1026 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001027
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001028- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1029 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001030
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001031- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1032
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001033- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1034 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1035
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001036- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1037 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1038 supported.
1039
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001040- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1041
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001042- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1043 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001044
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001045- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1046 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1047
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001048- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1049
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001050- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1051 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1052
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001053- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1054 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1055 functions but callable type objects.
1056
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001057- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001058 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001059 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001060
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001061- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1062 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001063
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001064- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1065 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001066
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001067- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1068 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1069 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1070 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1071
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001072- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1073 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001074
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001075- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1076 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1077 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1078 and __imul__.
1079
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001080- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001081 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1082 is called.
1083
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001084- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1085 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1086 interpreter was compiled.
1087
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001088- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1089 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1090 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001091 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001092 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1093 1, not 2.
1094
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001095- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1096 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1097 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1098 limit.
1099
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001100- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1101 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1102 bug #623464.
1103
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001104- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1105 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1106 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1107 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1108
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001109Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001110-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001111
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001112- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1113
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001114- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1115 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1116 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1117 with Python 2.3a2.
1118
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001119- os.path exposes getctime.
1120
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001121- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001122 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001123 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001124 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001125 unit tests of floating point results.
1126
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001127- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1128 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1129 has been increased.
1130
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001131- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1132 executed.
1133
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001134- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1135 postinstallation script.
1136
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001137- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1138 test the current module.
1139
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001140- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001141 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1142 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1143 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1144 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1145
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001146- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001147 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001148 Ward's Optik package.
1149
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001150- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1151 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1152 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1153 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1154
1155- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1156 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001157 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001158
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001159- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1160 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1161 shelf are binary pickles.
1162
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001163- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1164 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1165
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001166- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1167 modules are iterators now.
1168
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001169- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1170 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1171 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1172 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1173 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1174 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001175
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001176- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1177 with their entity value.
1178
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001179- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1180
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001181- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1182 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001183
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001184- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1185 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001186 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001187
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001188- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1189 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1190 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1191 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1192 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1193 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1194 main():
1195
1196 import locale
1197 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1198
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001199- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1200 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1201
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001202- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1203 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1204 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1205 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1206 to the new standard.
1207
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001208- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1209 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1210 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1211 an extension to the database.
1212
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001213- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1214 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1215 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1216 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001217 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001218
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001219- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001220 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001221
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001222- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1223 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1224 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1225 bounded integers.
1226
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001227- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1228 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1229 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1230 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1231 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1232 in existence.
1233
1234 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1235 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1236 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1237 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1238 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1239 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1240
1241 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1242 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1243 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1244 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1245
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001246- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1247 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1248 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1249
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001250- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1251
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001252- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1253 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1254 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1255 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1256
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001257- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1258 argument.
1259
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001260- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1261 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1262 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1263 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1264 [SF patch 560794].
1265
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001266- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1267 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1268 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001269 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1270 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1271 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001272
1273- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1274 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001275
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001276- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1277 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1278 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1279 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001280
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001281- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1282 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1283 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1284 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1285 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1286
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001287- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001288
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001289- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1290
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001291- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1292 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1293 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1294 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1295 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1296 identical to None.
1297
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001298- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1299 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1300 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1301 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1302 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1303 results now.
1304
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001305- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1306 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1307
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001308- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1309 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1310 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1311 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1312 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1313 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1314 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1315 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1316
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001317- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1318
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001319- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1320 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1321
1322- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1323 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1324 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1325 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1326 and other systems.
1327
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001328- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1329 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1330 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1331 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 +00001332 work well with these.
1333
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001334- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1335
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001336- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001337 connections.
1338
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001339- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1340 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1341 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1342
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001343- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1344 sets
1345
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001346- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1347 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1348 name.
1349
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001350- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1351 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1352 passed in.
1353
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001354- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001355 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001356 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1357 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001358
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001359- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1360
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001361- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1362
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001363- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1364 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1365 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1366
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001367- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1368 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1369 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1370 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001371 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001372
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001373- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001374 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001375 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001376
1377- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1378 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1379 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1380
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001381- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001382 the value of its expression argument.
1383
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001384- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1385 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1386 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1387
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001388- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1389 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1390 skipstone browser was included.
1391
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001392- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1393 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1394
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001395Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001396-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001397
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001398- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1399 names in addition to accepting file names.
1400
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001401- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1402 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1403 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1404 still used and useful.)
1405
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001406- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1407 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1408 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1409 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001410
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001411- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1412 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1413 the generated binary.
1414
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001415Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001416-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001417
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001418- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1419
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001420- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1421 except in the hands of experts.
1422
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001423- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001424 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1425 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1426 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001427
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001428- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1429 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1430 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1431 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1432 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1433 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1434 builds.
1435
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001436- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1437 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1438 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1439 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1440 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1441 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1442 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1443 new type.
1444
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001445- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001446
1447 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1448 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1449 positive infinities.
1450
1451 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1452 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1453 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1454 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1455 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1456 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1457 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1458
1459 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1460
1461 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1462
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001463- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1464 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1465 size of the executable.
1466
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001467- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1468 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1469 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1470 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001471
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001472- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1473
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001474- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1475 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1476 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001477
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001478- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1479 well as Unix.
1480
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001481- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1482 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1483 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1484 modules in the README file for details.
1485
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001486C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001487-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001488
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001489- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1490 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001491 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001492 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001493 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001494
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001495- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1496 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1497 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1498 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1499 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1500 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001501 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001502 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1503 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1504 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1505 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1506 aligned.)
1507
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001508- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1509 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1510 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1511
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001512- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1513 level.
1514
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001515- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1516 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1517 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1518 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1519 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1520
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001521- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1522 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1523 code.
1524
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001525- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1526 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1527 adjusting for negative indices.
1528
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001529- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1530 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1531 object.
1532
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001533- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1534 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1535 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1536
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001537- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1538 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001539
1540- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1541
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001542- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1543 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1544 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1545 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1546
1547- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1548
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001549- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001550
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001551- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001552 without going through the buffer API.
1553
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001554- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001555
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001556- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1557 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1558 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1559 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1560
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001561- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1562 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1563
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001564- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001565 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1566
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001567New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001568-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001569
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001570- OpenVMS is now supported.
1571
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001572- AtheOS is now supported.
1573
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001574- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1575
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001576- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1577
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001578Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001579-----
1580
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001581- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1582 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1583 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001584
1585Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001586-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001587
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001588- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1589 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1590 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1591 bugs.
1592 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001593 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001594 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1595 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001596 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001597
1598- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001599 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001600
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001601- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1602 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1603
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001604- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1605 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001606 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001607 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1608
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001609- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1610 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1611 use files" uninstall option).
1612
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001613- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1614
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001615- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1616 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1617
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001618- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1619 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1620 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1621
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001622- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1623 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1624 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1625 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1626 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001627 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1628 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1629 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001630
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001631- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001632 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001633 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1634 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1635 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1636 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1637 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1638 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1639 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1640 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1641 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1642 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1643 work around.
1644
1645- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1646 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1647 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1648 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1649 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1650 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1651 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1652 specified with O_CREAT too).
1653
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001654Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001655----
1656
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001657- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001658
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001659- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1660 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1661 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1662
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001663- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1664 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1665 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1666
1667- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1668 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1669 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1670 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1671 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1672 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1673 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1674 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001675
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001676- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1677 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1678 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001679
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001680- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1681 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1682 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1683 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1684 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001685
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001686- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1687 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1688 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001689
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001690- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1691 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001692
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001693- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1694 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1695 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1696 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1697 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001698
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001699- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1700 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1701 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1702
1703- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1704 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1705 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001706
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001707- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1708 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1709 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1710 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001711 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001712
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001713- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1714 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001715
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001716- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1717 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001718
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001719- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001720 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001721 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1722 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001723
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001724
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001725What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001726===============================
1727
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001728*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1729
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001730Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001731--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001732
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001733- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1734 with a custom metaclass.
1735
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001736Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001737-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001738
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001739- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1740 are proxies.
1741
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001742Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001743-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001744
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001745- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1746 very short strings.
1747
1748- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1749 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1750 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1751 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1752 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1753
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001754Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001755-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001756
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001757- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1758 close or delete time).
1759
1760- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1761 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1762
1763- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1764
1765- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001766 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001767
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001768Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001769-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001770
1771Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001772-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001773
1774C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001775-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001776
1777New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001778-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001779
1780Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001781-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001782
1783Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001784-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001785
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001786- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1787
1788- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1789 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1790
1791- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1792 deleted at process exit time.
1793
1794- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1795 in backslash.
1796
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001797Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001798----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001799
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001800- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1801 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1802 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1803
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001804
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001805What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001806===========================
1807
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001808*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1809
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001810Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001811--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001812
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001813- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1814 been extensively updated. See
1815
1816 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1817
1818 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1819
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001820- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1821 deleted!
1822
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001823- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1824 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1825 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1826 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1827 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1828
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001829- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1830
1831 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1832 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1833
1834 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1835 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1836 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1837 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1838 supported anyway.
1839
1840 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1841 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1842
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001843- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1844 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1845 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1846 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1847 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001848
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001849- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1850 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1851 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1852
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001853Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001854-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001855
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001856- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1857 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1858 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1859 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1860 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1861 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001862 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1863 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1864 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1865 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001866
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001867- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1868 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1869 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1870
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001871Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001872-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001873
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001874- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1875
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001876Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001877-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001878
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001879- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1880 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1881 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1882 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1883 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1884 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1885
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001886- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1887
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001888- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1889
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001890- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1891
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001892- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1893 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1894 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1895
1896- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1897
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001898Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001899-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001900
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001901- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1902 off a search on Google.
1903
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001904Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001905-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001906
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001907- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1908 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1909 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1910 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1911 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1912 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1913 other platforms should do likewise.
1914
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001915- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1916 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1917 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1918
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001919C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001920-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001921
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001922- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1923 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1924 producing key-value pairs.
1925
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001926- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001927 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001928 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1929 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1930 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1931 previously went unchallenged.
1932
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001933New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001934-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001935
1936Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001937-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001938
1939Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001940-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001941
1942Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001943----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001944
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001945- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1946 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001947
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001948- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1949 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1950 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1951 home.
1952
1953
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001954What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001955===========================
1956
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001957*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1958
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001959Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001960--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001961
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001962- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1963 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001964
1965 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001966 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001967
1968 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1969 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001970 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001971 This needs to be documented.
1972
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001973- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1974 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1975
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001976- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1977 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1978 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1979
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001980- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1981 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1982
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001983- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1984 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1985 class forbids it).
1986
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001987- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1988 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1989 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1990
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001991- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1992
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001993Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001994-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001995
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001996- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1997 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001998 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001999
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002000- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2001 (like 1 + '').
2002
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002003Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002004-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002005
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002006- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2007 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2008 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2009 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002010 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002011 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2012
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002013- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2014 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2015 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2016 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2017
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002018- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2019 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002020 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2021 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2022 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002023
2024- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2025 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002026
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002027- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2028 bytes on its input.
2029
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002030Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002031-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002032
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002033- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002034 convenience function.
2035
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002036- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2037 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2038 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002039 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2040 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2041 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2042 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2043 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2044 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002045
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002046- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2047 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2048 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2049 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2050
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002051- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2052 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2053 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2054
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002055- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2056 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2057 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2058 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2059
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002060- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2061 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002062 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002063 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2064 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2065 new -l and -e options.
2066
2067- statcache is now deprecated.
2068
2069- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2070 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002071 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002072 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2073 time properly taken into account.
2074
2075- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2076 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2077 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2078 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2079
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002080Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002081-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002082
2083Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002084-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002085
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002086- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2087 is built with libdb3 if available.
2088
2089- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2090
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002091C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002092-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002093
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002094- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2095 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2096 PySequence_Size().
2097
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002098- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2099
2100- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2101 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2102 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2103
2104- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2105 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2106
2107- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2108 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2109
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002110New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002111-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002112
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002113- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2114 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2115
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002116- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2117 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2118
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002119- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2120
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002121Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002122-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002123
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002124- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2125 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2126
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002127Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002128-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002129
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002130Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002131----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002132
2133- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2134 removed completely in the next release.
2135
2136- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2137 OSX.
2138
2139- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2140 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2141
2142- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2143
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002144
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002145What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002146===========================
2147
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002148*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2149
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002150Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002151--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002152
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002153- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002154 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002155 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002156 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2157 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002158 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2159 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002160 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2161 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002162
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002163- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2164 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2165
2166- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2167 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2168
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002169Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002170-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002171
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002172- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2173 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2174 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2175 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2176 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2177 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2178 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2179 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2180
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002181- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2182 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2183 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2184 example).
2185
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002186- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002187 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002188 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002189 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002190
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002191- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2192 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2193 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002194 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002195
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002196- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2197 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2198 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2199 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2200 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2201 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2202
2203 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2204
2205 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2206
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002207Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002208-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002209
2210- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2211
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002212- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2213
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002214- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2215 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002216
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002217- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2218 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2219 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2220 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2221 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2222 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002223 attributes.
2224
2225- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2226 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2227 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002228
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002229- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2230 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2231 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002232
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002233- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2234 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2235 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002236 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2237 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2238
2239- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2240 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002241
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002242Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002243-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002244
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002245- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2246 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2247
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002248- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2249 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2250 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2251 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2252
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002253- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2254 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2255 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2256 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2257
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002258 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2259 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2260 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2261 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2262 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2263 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2264 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2265 without losing information).
2266
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002267- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002268 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2269 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2270 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2271 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2272 module).
2273
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002274 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002275 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2276 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2277 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2278 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002279
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002280- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002281 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2282 encoding.
2283
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002284- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2285 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2286
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002287- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002288 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2289
2290- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2291 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2292 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2293 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2294
2295- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2296
2297- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2298 ON, and OFF.
2299
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002300- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2301 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2302
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002303Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002304-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002305
2306- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2307 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2308 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002309
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002310- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2311 been added: -X and -E.
2312
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002313Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002314-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002315
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002316- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2317 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2318
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002319C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002320-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002321
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002322- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2323 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2324 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2325 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2326 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2327
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002328- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2329 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2330 as long) arguments.
2331
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002332- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2333 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2334 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2335 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2336 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2337 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2338
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002339- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2340 input.
2341
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002342New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002343-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002344
2345Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002346-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002347
2348Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002349-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002350
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002351- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2352 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2353 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2354
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002355- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2356 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2357 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002358 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002359
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002360 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2361 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2362 import signal
2363 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002364
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002365 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002366 while 1:
2367 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002368 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002369 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2370 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2371 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2372 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002373
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002374
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002375What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2376===========================
2377
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002378*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2379
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002380Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002381--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002382
2383- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2384 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2385 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2386
2387- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2388 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2389 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2390 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2391 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2392 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2393 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002394
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002395- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002396 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002397 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2398 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2399 associate a docstring with a property.
2400
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002401- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2402 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2403 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2404 other built-in object types.
2405
2406- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2407 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2408 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2409 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2410 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2411
2412- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2413 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2414
2415- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2416 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002417 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002418 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2419 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2420 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2421 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2422 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2423
2424- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2425 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2426 class.
2427
2428- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2429 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2430 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2431 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2432
2433- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2434 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2435 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2436 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2437
2438- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2439 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2440
2441- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2442 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2443 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2444 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2445 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002446 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002447 with the same value as s.
2448
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002449- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2450
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002451Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002452----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002453
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002454- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2455
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002456- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2457 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2458 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2459 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2460 objects.
2461
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002462- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2463 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002464 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2465 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2466
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002467- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2468 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2469 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2470
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002471Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002472-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002473
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002474- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2475 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2476 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2477 by the instances.
2478
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002479- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2480 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2481 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2482
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002483- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2484 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2485 before the entire comparison is complete.
2486
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002487- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2488 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2489 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2490
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002491- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2492 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2493 getwriter().
2494
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002495- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2496 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2497
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002498- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002499 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2500 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2501
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002502- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2503 iterable object.
2504
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002505- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2506 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002507
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002508- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2509 authentication.
2510
2511- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2512 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002513
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002514- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002515 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2516 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2517 a sample driver.)
2518
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002519Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002520-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002521
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002522- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2523 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2524 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2525 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2526 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2527 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2528 kernel has large file support.
2529
2530- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2531 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2532 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2533 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2534 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2535
2536- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2537 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2538 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2539
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002540C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002541-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002542
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002543- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2544 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2545
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002546New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002547-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002548
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002549- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2550 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2551
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002552Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002553-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002554
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002555- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2556 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2557 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2558 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2559 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2560
2561- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2562 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2563 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2564 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2565
2566- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2567 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2568
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002569Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002570-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002571
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002572- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002573 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2574 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002575
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002576
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002577What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2578===========================
2579
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002580*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2581
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002582Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002583----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002584
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002585- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2586 big to represent as a C double.
2587
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002588- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2589 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2590 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2591 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2592 restriction).
2593
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002594- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2595 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2596 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2597 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2598 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2599
2600 >>> dir([])
2601 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2602 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2603 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2604 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2605 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2606 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2607 'reverse', 'sort']
2608
2609 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2610
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002611- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002612 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2613 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2614 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2615 OverflowError exception.
2616
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002617- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002618 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002619 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2620 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2621 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2622 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2623 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002624 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002625 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2626 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2627
2628 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2629 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2630 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2631 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002632
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002633- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002634 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2635 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2636 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2637 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2638 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2639 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2640 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2641 once it is created.
2642
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002643- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2644 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2645 (key, value) pairs.
2646
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002647- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002648 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2649 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2650
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002651- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2652 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2653 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2654 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2655 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002656
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002657- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002658 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2659 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2660
2661 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2662
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002663- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002664 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2665
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002666Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002668
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002669- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002670 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2671 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002672
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002673- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2674 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2675 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2676 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2677 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2678 in this area anymore).
2679
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002680- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2681 threading.Timer.
2682
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002683- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2684 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2685
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002686- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002687 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2688
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002689- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002690 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2691 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2692 converted to Python longs.
2693
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002694- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002695 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2696
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002697- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2698 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2699 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2700
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002701Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002702-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002703
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002704- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2705 division operators as per PEP 238.
2706
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002707Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002708-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002709
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002710- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2711 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2712 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2713 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2714
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002715C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002716-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002717
2718- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002719
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002720- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2721 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002722 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002723
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002724 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2725 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002726 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002727 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002728
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002729- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002730 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2731 module:
2732
2733 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002734
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002735 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2736 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002737
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002738 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2739 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002740
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002741 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2742
2743 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2744
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002745- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002746 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2747 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2748 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002749
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002750New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002751-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002752
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002753- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2754 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2755 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2756 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2757 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002758
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002759Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002760-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002761
2762Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002763-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002764
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002765- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2766 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2767 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2768 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002769 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2770 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2771 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2772 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2773 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002774
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002775- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002776 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2777
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002778
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002779What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2780===========================
2781
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002782*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2783
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002784Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002785-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002786
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002787- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2788 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2789
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002790- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2791 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2792 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002793
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002794- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2795 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2796 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2797 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002798
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002799- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2800
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002801- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002802
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002803Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002804-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002805
2806- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002807 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002808 the module docstring for details.
2809
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002810Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002811-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002812
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002813- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002814 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2815 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2816 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002817
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002818- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2819 Nick Mathewson.
2820
2821Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002822----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002823
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002824- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2825 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2826 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2827 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2828 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2829 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2830 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2831 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2832
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002833- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2834 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2835 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2836 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2837
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002838- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2839 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2840 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2841 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2842 come a long way).
2843
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002844- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2845 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2846 write filters for these warnings).
2847
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002848- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2849 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2850 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2851 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2852 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2853
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002854- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2855 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2856 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2857 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2858 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2859 older distribution.
2860
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002861Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002862-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002863
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002864- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2865 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002866 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002867
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002868- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2869 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2870 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2871
2872- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2873
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002874- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2875
2876- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2877
2878- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2879
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002880- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002881
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002882- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2883
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002884New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002885-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002886
2887C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002888-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002889
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002890- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2891 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2892 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2893 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2894 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2895 against buffer overruns.
2896
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002897- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002898 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2899 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002900 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2901 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2902 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2903
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002904- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2905 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2906 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2907 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2908 deprecated.
2909
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002910Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002911-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002912
2913- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2914 relevant is found.
2915
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002916
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002917What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002918===========================
2919
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002920*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2921
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002922Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002923----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002924
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002925- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2926 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2927 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2928 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2929 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2930 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2931 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2932 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002933 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002934 repaired.
2935
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002936- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002937 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002938 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2939 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2940 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2941 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2942 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2943 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2944 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2945 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2946
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002947- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2948 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2949 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2950 leading BMO character).
2951
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002952- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2953 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2954 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2955
2956 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2957 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2958 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002959
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002960 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2961 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2962 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2963 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2964 for various simple to use conversions.
2965
2966 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2967 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2968
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002969 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2970 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2971 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2972 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2973 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2974 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2975 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2976 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2977 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2978 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2979 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2980 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2981 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2982 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2983 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002984
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002985- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2986 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2987 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002988 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002989 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002990
2991 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002992 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2993 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2994 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2995 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2996 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002997 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2998 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002999
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003000 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3001 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3002 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003003 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003004
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003005- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3006 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3007 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3008 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3009 floating arithmetic,
3010
3011 x = 9007199254740992.0
3012 print long(x)
3013
3014 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3015 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3016 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3017 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3018 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3019 functions are of good quality).
3020
3021 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3022 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3023 algorithms to break.
3024
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003025- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3026 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3027 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3028 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3029 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3030 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3031 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3032 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3033 order.
3034
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003035- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3036 operation along the most common code paths.
3037
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003038- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3039 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3040
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003041- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3042 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3043 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3044 {}.update(UserDict())
3045
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003046- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3047 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3048 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3049 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3050 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3051 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3052 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3053 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3054
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003055- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003056 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003057
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003058 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003059 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3060 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003061 join() method of strings
3062 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003063 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3064 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003065 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003066 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003067
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003068- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3069 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3070
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003071- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3072 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3073
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003074- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3075 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3076 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3077 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3078
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003079- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3080 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003081 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003082 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3083 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003084
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003085- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3086
3087
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003088Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003089-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003090
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003091- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003092 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003093 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3094 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3095
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003096- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3097 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3098
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003099- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3100 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3101 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3102 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3103
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003104- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3105 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3106 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3107
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003108- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3109
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003110- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3111
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003112- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3113 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3114 that are still imported into string.py).
3115
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003116- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3117
3118- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3119 Now it does.
3120
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003121- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3122
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003123- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3124 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3125 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3126 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3127 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003128 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3129 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003130
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003131- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3132 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3133 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3134 'help(object)'.
3135
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003136Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003137-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003138
3139- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003140 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003141 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3142 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3143
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003144- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003145 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3146 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003147
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003148C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003149-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003150
3151- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3152 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003153
3154----
3155
3156**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**