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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +000015- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
16 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
17 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
18 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
19 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
20 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
21 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
22 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
23 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
24 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
25 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
26 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
27 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +000028
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +000029- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
30 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
31 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
32 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
33 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
34
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +000035- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
36 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
37
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +000038- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
39 It's writable again.
40
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +000041- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
42 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
43 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
44 preferred, then __iter__ can be overriden.
45
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000046Extension modules
47-----------------
48
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +000049- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
50 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
51
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +000052- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
53 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +000054
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +000055- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
56
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +000057- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
58 Fixes SF bug #730685.
59
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +000060- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
61 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
62 for many BSD-derived systems.
63
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000064Library
65-------
66
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +000067- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
68
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +000069- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
70 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
71 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
72 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
73
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +000074- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
75 handling.
76
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +000077- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
78 __doc__ of data descriptors.
79
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +000080- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
81 in socket.py.
82
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +000083- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
84
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +000085- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
86 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
87 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
88 opener with proxy support.
89
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000090Tools/Demos
91-----------
92
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +000093- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
94 files.
95
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000096Build
97-----
98
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +000099- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows to specify a
100 different root directory.
101
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000102C API
103-----
104
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000105- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
106 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
107 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
108 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
109 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
110 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
111 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
112 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
113 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
114 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
115
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000116New platforms
117-------------
118
119None this time.
120
121Tests
122-----
123
124- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
125 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
126
127Windows
128-------
129
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000130- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
131 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
132 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
133 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
134 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
135 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
136 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
137 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
138 that's what it's for.
139
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000140Mac
141---
142
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000143- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
144 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
145 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
146 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000147
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000148What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
149================================
150
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000151*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000152
153Core and builtins
154-----------------
155
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000156- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
157 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
158
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000159- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
160 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
161 and cannot be strings).
162
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000163- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
164 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
165 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
166 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
167
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000168- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
169 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
170 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
171 Python itself.
172
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000173- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
174 the referenced object, if it has one.
175
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000176- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
177 the thread started at
178 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
179
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000180- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
181 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
182 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
183 placed on a list index.
184
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000185- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
186 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
187 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
188 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
189
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000190- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
191 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
192 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
193 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
194 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
195 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
196 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
197
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000198- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
199 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
200 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
201 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
202 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
203
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000204- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
205 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000206
207- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
208 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
209 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
210 #693195.)
211
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000212- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
213 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000214
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000215- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000216 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000217 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
218 interpreter executions, would fail.
219
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000220- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000221 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000222 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000223
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000224Extension modules
225-----------------
226
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000227- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
228 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
229 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
230 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
231
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000232- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
233 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
234
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000235- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
236 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
237 and Greg Chapman.)
238
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000239- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
240 recursively.
241
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000242- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000243 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
244 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
245 leaks.
246
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000247- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
248
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000249- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
250 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
251 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
252 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
253 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
254 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
255 #705836.
256
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000257- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
258 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
259
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000260- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
261 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
262 See SF bug #692416.
263
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000264- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
265 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
266
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000267- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
268 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
269 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000270
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000271- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000272 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
273 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
274
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000275- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
276 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
277 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
278 timeouts to work properly.
279
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000280Library
281-------
282
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000283- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
284 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
285 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
286 future release.
287
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000288- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
289 for querying platform dependent features.
290
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000291- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000292
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000293- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
294 pickle protocol versions.
295
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000296- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
297 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
298 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
299
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000300- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
301
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000302- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
303 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
304 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
305 modules.
306
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000307- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
308 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
309 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
310
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000311- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
312 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
313
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000314- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
315 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
316 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
317
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000318- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000319 MS Office extensions.
320
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000321- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
322 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
323
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000324- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
325 execution speed of expressions and statements.
326
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000327- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
328 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
329 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
330 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
331 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
332 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
333
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000334- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
335 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
336 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000337
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000338- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
339 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
340 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
341
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000342- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
343
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000344- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
345 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
346 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
347
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000348Tools/Demos
349-----------
350
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000351- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
352 See the module docstring for details.
353
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000354Build
355-----
356
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000357- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
358 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000359
360C API
361-----
362
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000363- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
364
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000365- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
366 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
367 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
368
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000369- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
370 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000371
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000372 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
373 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
374 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000375
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000376- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000377 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
378
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000379- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
380 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
381 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000382
383New platforms
384-------------
385
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000386None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000387
388Tests
389-----
390
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000391- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
392 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000393
394Windows
395-------
396
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000397- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
398 function.
399
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000400- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
401 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000402
403Mac
404---
405
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000406- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
407 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000408
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000409- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
410 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000411
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000412- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
413 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
414 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000415
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000416- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000417 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
418 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000419
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000420- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
421 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000422
423
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000424What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
425=================================
426
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000427*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000428
429Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000430-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000431
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000432- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
433 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
434 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
435
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000436- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
437 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
438 (SF patch #664376.)
439
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000440- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
441 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
442 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
443 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
444 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
445 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000446 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000447
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000448- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
449 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
450 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
451 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000452 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000453
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000454- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
455 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
456 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
457 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
458 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
459 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
460 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
461 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
462 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
463 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
464 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
465
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000466- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
467 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
468 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
469 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
470 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
471 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
472
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000473- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
474 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
475
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000476- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
477 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
478 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
479 case.)
480
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000481- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
482 passed as unicode strings.
483
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000484- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
485 See SF bug #683467.
486
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000487- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
488 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
489
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000490- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
491
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000492- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
493
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000494- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
495 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
496 arguments.
497
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000498- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
499 See SF bug #667147.
500
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000501- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000502 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000503 See SF bug #676155.
504
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000505- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000506 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000507 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
508 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
509 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
510 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
511 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
512 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000513
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000514Extension modules
515-----------------
516
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000517- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
518 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
519 tp_as_number pointer.
520
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000521- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
522 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
523 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
524 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
525 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
526
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000527- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
528
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000529- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
530
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000531- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000532 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000533 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
534 patch #678531.)
535
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000536- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
537 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
538
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000539- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
540 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
541
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000542- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
543
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000544- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
545 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
546 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
547
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000548- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
549
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000550- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
551 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
552
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000553- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000554
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000555- datetime changes:
556
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000557 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
558
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000559 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
560 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
561 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
562 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
563 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
564 now.
565
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000566 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000567 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
568 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000569
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000570 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000571 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000572 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
573 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
574 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
575 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000576
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000577 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
578 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
579 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000580 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
581
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000582 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
583 by a later example coded by Guido.
584
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000585 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000586 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
587 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
588 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000589 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
590 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
591
592 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
593 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
594 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
595 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
596 tzinfo subclass instance.
597
598 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
599 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
600 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
601 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
602 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
603 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
604 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
605 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000606
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000607 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
608 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
609 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
610 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
611 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000612 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
613
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000614 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000615
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000616 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
617 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
618 as a naive datetime object.
619
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000620 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
621 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
622 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
623
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000624 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
625 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
626 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
627 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
628 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
629 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
630 comparison.
631
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000632 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
633 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
634 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
635 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000636 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000637
638 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000639
640 and ::
641
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000642 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
643
644 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
645 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
646 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
647 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
648
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000649 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
650 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
651 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
652 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
653 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
654
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000655 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
656 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000657 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
658 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000659
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000660Library
661-------
662
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000663- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
664 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
665
666- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
667 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
668 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
669 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
670 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
671 See PEP 307 for details.
672
673- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
674 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
675
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000676- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
677 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000678 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000679 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
680 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000681 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000682
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000683- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
684 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
685
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000686- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
687 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
688 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
689
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000690- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
691
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000692- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
693 exception.
694
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000695- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
696 class.
697
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000698- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
699 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
700 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
701
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000702- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
703 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
704
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000705- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000706 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
707 See SF bug #659228.
708
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000709- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
710 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
711 See SF patch #651082.
712
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000713- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000714
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000715- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
716 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
717
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000718- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000719 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000720
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000721- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
722 DOS paths from other platforms.
723
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000724Tools/Demos
725-----------
726
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000727- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
728 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
729 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
730 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
731 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
732 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
733 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
734 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
735 example:
736
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000737 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
738 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000739
740 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
741
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000742
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000743Build
744-----
745
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000746- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
747 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
748 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000749 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
750
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000751 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
752
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000753- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
754 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
755 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
756 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
757 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
758 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
759 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
760 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
761 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
762
763- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
764 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
765 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
766 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
767
768- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
769 from the Tools/scripts directory.
770
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000771C API
772-----
773
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000774- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
775 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000776
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000777- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
778 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
779 tp_as_number pointer.
780
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000781- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
782 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
783 (SF #681367)
784
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000785- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
786 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
787 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
788 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000789
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000790Tests
791-----
792
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000793- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000794 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
795 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
796 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
797 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
798 pydoc.)
799
800- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
801
802- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000803
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000804Windows
805-------
806
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000807- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
808 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
809 time).
810
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000811- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
812 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
813
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000814- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
815 release without strong cryptography.
816
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000817- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000818 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000819
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000820- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
821 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
822
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000823Mac
824---
825
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000826- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
827 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000828
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000829- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
830 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
831 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000832
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000833- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
834 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000835
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000836- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
837 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
838 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
839 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000840
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000841- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000842 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
843 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
844 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000845
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000846
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000847What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000848=================================
849
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000850*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000851
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000852Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000853--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000854
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000855- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
856
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000857- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
858 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000859 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000860 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000861 a different meaning than before.
862
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000863- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000864 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000865 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000866
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000867- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000868 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000869 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000870
871- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
872 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
873 and deallocation.
874
875- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
876 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
877
878- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
879 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
880 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
881 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
882 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
883
884- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
885 now detected by the garbage collector.
886
887- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
888 [SF bug 519621]
889
890- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
891 identifier.
892
893- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
894 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
895 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
896 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
897 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
898 [SF bug 563060]
899
900- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
901 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
902 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
903 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
904 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
905
906- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
907 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
908 not called. [SF bug #537450]
909
910- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
911
912- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
913 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
914 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
915 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
916 state of the slots would be lost.)
917
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000918Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000919-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000920
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000921- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000922 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
923 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
924 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
925 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000926 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
927 Jython 2.1.
928
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000929- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000930 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000931 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
932 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
933 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
934 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
935 these, see PEP 302.
936
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000937- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
938 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
939 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
940
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000941- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
942 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
943 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
944
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000945- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
946 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
947 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
948
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000949- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
950 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
951 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
952 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
953 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
954 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
955 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
956 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
957 releases or implementations.
958
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000959- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000960 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
961 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000962
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000963- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
964 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
965
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000966- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
967 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
968 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
969
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000970- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
971 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
972
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000973- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
974 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000975 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
976 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000977
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000978- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
979 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
980 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
981 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
982 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
983
984 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
985 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
986 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
987 pattern.
988
989 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
990 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
991 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
992 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
993
994 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
995 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
996 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
997 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
998 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
999 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1000
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001001- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1002 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1003 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1004 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1005 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1006 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1007 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1008 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001009
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001010- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1011 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1012 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1013 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1014 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001015 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1016 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1017 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1018 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1019 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1020 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1021 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001022
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001023- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1024 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1025
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001026- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1027 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1028 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1029 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1030 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1031 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1032 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1033 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1034 to Zack Weinberg!
1035
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001036- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1037 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1038 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1039 type. This has been fixed now.
1040
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001041- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1042 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1043 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1044
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001045- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1046 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1047 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1048 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1049 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1050 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1051 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1052 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001053 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001054
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001055- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1056 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1057 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001058
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001059- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1060 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1061 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1062 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1063 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1064 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1065 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1066 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001067 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001068 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1069 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1070
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001071- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1072 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1073 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1074 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1075 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1076 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1077 this.)
1078
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001079- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1080 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001081 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001082 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001083 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1084 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001085 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1086 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001087
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001088- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1089 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1090 currently running.
1091
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001092- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1093 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1094 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1095 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1096
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001097- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1098 as directory names.
1099
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001100- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1101 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1102
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001103- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1104 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1105
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001106- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001107 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1108 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001109
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001110- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1111 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1112 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1113 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1114 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1115
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001116- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1117 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1118 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1119 removed.
1120
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001121- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1122 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1123 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1124
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001125- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1126 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1127 to __debug__.
1128
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001129- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1130 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1131 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1132
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001133- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1134 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1135 deprecated now.
1136
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001137- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1138 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1139 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001140
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001141- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1142 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1143 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1144 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1145 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001146
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001147- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1148 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1149
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001150- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1151 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1152 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001153 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001154 is backward compatible.
1155
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001156- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1157 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1158 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1159 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1160 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1161
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001162- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1163 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1164 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1165 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1166 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1167 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001168
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001169- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1170 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1171
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001172- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1173 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1174
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001175- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1176 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1177 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1178 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1179 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1180
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001181- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1182 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1183 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1184
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001185- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001186 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1187
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001188- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1189 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1190 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001191
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001192- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1193 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1194
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001195- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1196 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1197 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1198
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001199- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1200
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001201Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001202-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001203
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001204- Added three operators to the operator module:
1205 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1206 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1207 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1208
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001209- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1210
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001211- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1212 archives.
1213
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001214- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1215 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1216 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1217
1218 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1219
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001220- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1221 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1222 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001223 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001224
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001225- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1226 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1227 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1228 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001229 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1230 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1231 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1232 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001233
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001234- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1235 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001236
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001237- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1238
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001239- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1240 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1241
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001242- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1243 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1244 supported.
1245
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001246- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1247
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001248- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1249 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001250
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001251- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1252 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1253
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001254- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1255
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001256- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1257 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1258
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001259- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1260 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1261 functions but callable type objects.
1262
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001263- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001264 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001265 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001266
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001267- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1268 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001269
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001270- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1271 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001272
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001273- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1274 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1275 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1276 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1277
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001278- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1279 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001280
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001281- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1282 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1283 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1284 and __imul__.
1285
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001286- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001287 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1288 is called.
1289
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001290- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1291 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1292 interpreter was compiled.
1293
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001294- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1295 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1296 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001297 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001298 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1299 1, not 2.
1300
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001301- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1302 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1303 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1304 limit.
1305
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001306- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1307 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1308 bug #623464.
1309
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001310- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1311 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1312 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1313 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1314
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001315Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001316-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001317
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001318- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1319
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001320- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1321 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1322 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1323 with Python 2.3a2.
1324
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001325- os.path exposes getctime.
1326
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001327- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001328 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001329 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001330 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001331 unit tests of floating point results.
1332
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001333- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1334 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1335 has been increased.
1336
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001337- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1338 executed.
1339
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001340- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1341 postinstallation script.
1342
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001343- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1344 test the current module.
1345
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001346- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001347 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1348 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1349 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1350 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1351
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001352- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001353 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001354 Ward's Optik package.
1355
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001356- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1357 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1358 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1359 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1360
1361- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1362 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001363 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001364
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001365- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1366 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1367 shelf are binary pickles.
1368
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001369- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1370 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1371
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001372- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1373 modules are iterators now.
1374
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001375- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1376 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1377 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1378 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1379 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1380 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001381
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001382- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1383 with their entity value.
1384
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001385- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1386
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001387- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1388 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001389
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001390- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1391 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001392 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001393
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001394- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1395 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1396 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1397 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1398 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1399 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1400 main():
1401
1402 import locale
1403 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1404
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001405- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1406 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1407
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001408- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1409 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1410 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1411 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1412 to the new standard.
1413
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001414- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1415 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1416 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1417 an extension to the database.
1418
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001419- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1420 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1421 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1422 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001423 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001424
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001425- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001426 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001427
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001428- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1429 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1430 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1431 bounded integers.
1432
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001433- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1434 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1435 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1436 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1437 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1438 in existence.
1439
1440 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1441 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1442 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1443 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1444 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1445 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1446
1447 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1448 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1449 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1450 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1451
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001452- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1453 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1454 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1455
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001456- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1457
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001458- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1459 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1460 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1461 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1462
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001463- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1464 argument.
1465
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001466- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1467 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1468 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1469 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1470 [SF patch 560794].
1471
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001472- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1473 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1474 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001475 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1476 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1477 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001478
1479- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1480 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001481
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001482- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1483 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1484 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1485 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001486
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001487- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1488 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1489 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1490 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1491 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1492
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001493- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001494
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001495- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1496
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001497- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1498 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1499 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1500 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1501 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1502 identical to None.
1503
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001504- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1505 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1506 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1507 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1508 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1509 results now.
1510
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001511- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1512 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1513
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001514- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1515 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1516 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1517 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1518 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1519 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1520 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1521 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1522
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001523- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1524
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001525- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1526 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1527
1528- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1529 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1530 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1531 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1532 and other systems.
1533
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001534- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1535 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1536 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1537 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 +00001538 work well with these.
1539
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001540- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1541
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001542- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001543 connections.
1544
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001545- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1546 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1547 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1548
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001549- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1550 sets
1551
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001552- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1553 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1554 name.
1555
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001556- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1557 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1558 passed in.
1559
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001560- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001561 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001562 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1563 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001564
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001565- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1566
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001567- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1568
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001569- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1570 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1571 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1572
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001573- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1574 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1575 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1576 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001577 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001578
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001579- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001580 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001581 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001582
1583- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1584 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1585 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1586
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001587- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001588 the value of its expression argument.
1589
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001590- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1591 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1592 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1593
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001594- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1595 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1596 skipstone browser was included.
1597
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001598- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1599 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1600
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001601Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001602-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001603
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001604- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1605 names in addition to accepting file names.
1606
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001607- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1608 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1609 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1610 still used and useful.)
1611
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001612- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1613 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1614 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1615 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001616
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001617- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1618 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1619 the generated binary.
1620
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001621Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001622-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001623
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001624- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1625
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001626- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1627 except in the hands of experts.
1628
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001629- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001630 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1631 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1632 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001633
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001634- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1635 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1636 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1637 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1638 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1639 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1640 builds.
1641
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001642- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1643 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1644 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1645 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1646 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1647 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1648 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1649 new type.
1650
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001651- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001652
1653 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1654 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1655 positive infinities.
1656
1657 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1658 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1659 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1660 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1661 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1662 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1663 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1664
1665 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1666
1667 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1668
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001669- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1670 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1671 size of the executable.
1672
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001673- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1674 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1675 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1676 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001677
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001678- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1679
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001680- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1681 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1682 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001683
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001684- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1685 well as Unix.
1686
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001687- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1688 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1689 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1690 modules in the README file for details.
1691
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001692C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001693-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001694
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001695- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1696 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001697 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001698 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001699 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001700
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001701- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1702 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1703 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1704 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1705 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1706 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001707 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001708 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1709 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1710 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1711 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1712 aligned.)
1713
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001714- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1715 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1716 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1717
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001718- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1719 level.
1720
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001721- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1722 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1723 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1724 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1725 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1726
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001727- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1728 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1729 code.
1730
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001731- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1732 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1733 adjusting for negative indices.
1734
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001735- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1736 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1737 object.
1738
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001739- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1740 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1741 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1742
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001743- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1744 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001745
1746- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1747
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001748- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1749 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1750 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1751 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1752
1753- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1754
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001755- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001756
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001757- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001758 without going through the buffer API.
1759
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001760- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001761
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001762- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1763 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1764 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1765 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1766
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001767- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1768 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1769
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001770- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001771 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1772
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001773New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001774-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001775
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001776- OpenVMS is now supported.
1777
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001778- AtheOS is now supported.
1779
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001780- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1781
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001782- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1783
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001784Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001785-----
1786
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001787- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1788 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1789 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001790
1791Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001792-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001793
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001794- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1795 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1796 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1797 bugs.
1798 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001799 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001800 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1801 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001802 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001803
1804- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001805 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001806
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001807- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1808 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1809
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001810- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1811 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001812 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001813 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1814
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001815- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1816 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1817 use files" uninstall option).
1818
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001819- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1820
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001821- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1822 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1823
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001824- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1825 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1826 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1827
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001828- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1829 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1830 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1831 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1832 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001833 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1834 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1835 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001836
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001837- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001838 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001839 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1840 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1841 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1842 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1843 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1844 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1845 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1846 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1847 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1848 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1849 work around.
1850
1851- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1852 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1853 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1854 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1855 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1856 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1857 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1858 specified with O_CREAT too).
1859
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001860Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001861----
1862
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001863- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001864
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001865- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1866 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1867 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1868
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001869- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1870 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1871 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1872
1873- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1874 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1875 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1876 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1877 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1878 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1879 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1880 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001881
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001882- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1883 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1884 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001885
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001886- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1887 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1888 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1889 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1890 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001891
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001892- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1893 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1894 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001895
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001896- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1897 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001898
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001899- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1900 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1901 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1902 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1903 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001904
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001905- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1906 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1907 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1908
1909- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1910 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1911 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001912
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001913- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1914 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1915 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1916 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001917 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001918
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001919- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1920 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001921
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001922- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1923 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001924
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001925- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001926 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001927 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1928 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001929
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001930
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001931What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001932===============================
1933
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001934*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1935
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001936Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001937--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001938
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001939- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1940 with a custom metaclass.
1941
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001942Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001943-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001944
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001945- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1946 are proxies.
1947
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001948Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001949-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001950
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001951- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1952 very short strings.
1953
1954- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1955 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1956 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1957 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1958 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1959
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001960Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001961-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001962
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001963- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1964 close or delete time).
1965
1966- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1967 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1968
1969- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1970
1971- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001972 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001973
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001974Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001975-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001976
1977Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001978-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001979
1980C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001981-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001982
1983New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001984-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001985
1986Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001987-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001988
1989Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001990-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001991
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001992- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1993
1994- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1995 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1996
1997- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1998 deleted at process exit time.
1999
2000- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2001 in backslash.
2002
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002003Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002004----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002005
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002006- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2007 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2008 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2009
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002010
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002011What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002012===========================
2013
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002014*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2015
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002016Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002017--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002018
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002019- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2020 been extensively updated. See
2021
2022 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2023
2024 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2025
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002026- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2027 deleted!
2028
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002029- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2030 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2031 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2032 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2033 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2034
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002035- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2036
2037 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2038 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2039
2040 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2041 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2042 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2043 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2044 supported anyway.
2045
2046 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2047 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2048
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002049- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2050 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2051 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2052 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2053 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002054
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002055- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2056 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2057 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2058
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002059Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002060-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002061
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002062- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2063 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2064 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2065 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2066 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2067 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002068 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2069 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2070 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2071 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002072
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002073- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2074 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2075 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2076
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002077Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002078-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002079
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002080- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2081
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002082Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002083-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002084
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002085- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2086 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2087 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2088 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2089 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2090 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2091
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002092- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2093
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002094- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2095
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002096- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2097
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002098- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2099 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2100 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2101
2102- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2103
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002104Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002105-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002106
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002107- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2108 off a search on Google.
2109
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002110Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002111-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002112
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002113- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2114 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2115 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2116 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2117 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2118 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2119 other platforms should do likewise.
2120
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002121- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2122 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2123 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2124
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002125C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002126-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002127
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002128- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2129 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2130 producing key-value pairs.
2131
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002132- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002133 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002134 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2135 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2136 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2137 previously went unchallenged.
2138
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002139New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002140-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002141
2142Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002143-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002144
2145Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002146-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002147
2148Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002149----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002150
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002151- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2152 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002153
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002154- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2155 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2156 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2157 home.
2158
2159
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002160What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002161===========================
2162
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002163*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2164
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002165Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002166--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002167
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002168- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2169 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002170
2171 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002172 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002173
2174 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2175 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002176 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002177 This needs to be documented.
2178
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002179- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2180 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2181
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002182- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2183 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2184 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2185
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002186- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2187 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2188
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002189- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2190 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2191 class forbids it).
2192
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002193- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2194 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2195 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2196
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002197- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2198
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002199Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002200-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002201
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002202- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2203 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002204 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002205
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002206- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2207 (like 1 + '').
2208
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002209Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002210-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002211
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002212- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2213 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2214 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2215 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002216 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002217 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2218
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002219- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2220 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2221 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2222 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2223
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002224- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2225 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002226 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2227 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2228 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002229
2230- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2231 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002232
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002233- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2234 bytes on its input.
2235
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002236Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002237-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002238
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002239- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002240 convenience function.
2241
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002242- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2243 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2244 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002245 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2246 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2247 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2248 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2249 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2250 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002251
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002252- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2253 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2254 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2255 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2256
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002257- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2258 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2259 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2260
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002261- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2262 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2263 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2264 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2265
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002266- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2267 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002268 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002269 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2270 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2271 new -l and -e options.
2272
2273- statcache is now deprecated.
2274
2275- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2276 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002277 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002278 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2279 time properly taken into account.
2280
2281- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2282 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2283 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2284 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2285
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002286Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002287-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002288
2289Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002290-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002291
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002292- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2293 is built with libdb3 if available.
2294
2295- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2296
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002297C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002298-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002299
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002300- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2301 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2302 PySequence_Size().
2303
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002304- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2305
2306- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2307 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2308 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2309
2310- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2311 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2312
2313- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2314 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2315
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002316New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002317-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002318
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002319- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2320 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2321
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002322- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2323 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2324
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002325- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2326
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002327Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002328-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002329
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002330- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2331 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2332
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002333Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002334-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002335
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002336Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002337----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002338
2339- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2340 removed completely in the next release.
2341
2342- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2343 OSX.
2344
2345- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2346 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2347
2348- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2349
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002350
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002351What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002352===========================
2353
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002354*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2355
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002356Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002357--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002358
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002359- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002360 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002361 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002362 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2363 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002364 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2365 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002366 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2367 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002368
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002369- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2370 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2371
2372- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2373 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2374
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002375Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002376-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002377
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002378- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2379 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2380 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2381 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2382 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2383 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2384 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2385 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2386
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002387- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2388 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2389 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2390 example).
2391
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002392- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002393 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002394 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002395 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002396
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002397- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2398 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2399 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002400 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002401
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002402- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2403 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2404 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2405 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2406 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2407 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2408
2409 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2410
2411 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2412
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002413Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002414-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002415
2416- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2417
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002418- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2419
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002420- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2421 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002422
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002423- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2424 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2425 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2426 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2427 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2428 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002429 attributes.
2430
2431- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2432 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2433 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002434
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002435- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2436 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2437 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002438
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002439- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2440 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2441 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002442 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2443 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2444
2445- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2446 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002447
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002448Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002449-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002450
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002451- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2452 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2453
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002454- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2455 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2456 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2457 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2458
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002459- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2460 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2461 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2462 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2463
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002464 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2465 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2466 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2467 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2468 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2469 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2470 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2471 without losing information).
2472
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002473- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002474 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2475 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2476 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2477 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2478 module).
2479
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002480 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002481 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2482 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2483 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2484 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002485
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002486- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002487 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2488 encoding.
2489
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002490- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2491 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2492
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002493- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002494 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2495
2496- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2497 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2498 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2499 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2500
2501- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2502
2503- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2504 ON, and OFF.
2505
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002506- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2507 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2508
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002509Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002510-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002511
2512- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2513 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2514 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002515
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002516- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2517 been added: -X and -E.
2518
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002519Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002520-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002521
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002522- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2523 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2524
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002525C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002526-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002527
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002528- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2529 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2530 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2531 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2532 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2533
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002534- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2535 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2536 as long) arguments.
2537
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002538- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2539 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2540 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2541 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2542 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2543 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2544
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002545- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2546 input.
2547
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002548New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002549-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002550
2551Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002552-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002553
2554Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002555-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002556
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002557- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2558 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2559 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2560
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002561- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2562 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2563 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002564 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002565
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002566 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2567 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2568 import signal
2569 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002570
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002571 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002572 while 1:
2573 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002574 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002575 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2576 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2577 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2578 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002579
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002580
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002581What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2582===========================
2583
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002584*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2585
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002586Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002587--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002588
2589- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2590 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2591 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2592
2593- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2594 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2595 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2596 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2597 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2598 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2599 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002600
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002601- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002602 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002603 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2604 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2605 associate a docstring with a property.
2606
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002607- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2608 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2609 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2610 other built-in object types.
2611
2612- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2613 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2614 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2615 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2616 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2617
2618- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2619 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2620
2621- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2622 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002623 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002624 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2625 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2626 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2627 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2628 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2629
2630- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2631 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2632 class.
2633
2634- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2635 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2636 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2637 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2638
2639- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2640 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2641 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2642 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2643
2644- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2645 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2646
2647- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2648 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2649 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2650 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2651 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002652 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002653 with the same value as s.
2654
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002655- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2656
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002657Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002658----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002659
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002660- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2661
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002662- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2663 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2664 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2665 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2666 objects.
2667
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002668- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2669 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002670 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2671 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2672
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002673- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2674 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2675 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2676
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002677Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002678-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002679
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002680- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2681 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2682 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2683 by the instances.
2684
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002685- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2686 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2687 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2688
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002689- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2690 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2691 before the entire comparison is complete.
2692
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002693- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2694 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2695 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2696
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002697- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2698 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2699 getwriter().
2700
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002701- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2702 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2703
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002704- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002705 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2706 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2707
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002708- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2709 iterable object.
2710
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002711- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2712 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002713
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002714- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2715 authentication.
2716
2717- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2718 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002719
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002720- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002721 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2722 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2723 a sample driver.)
2724
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002725Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002726-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002727
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002728- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2729 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2730 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2731 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2732 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2733 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2734 kernel has large file support.
2735
2736- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2737 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2738 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2739 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2740 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2741
2742- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2743 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2744 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2745
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002746C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002747-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002748
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002749- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2750 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2751
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002752New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002753-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002754
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002755- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2756 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2757
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002758Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002759-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002760
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002761- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2762 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2763 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2764 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2765 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2766
2767- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2768 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2769 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2770 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2771
2772- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2773 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2774
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002775Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002776-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002777
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002778- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002779 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2780 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002781
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002782
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002783What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2784===========================
2785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2787
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002788Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002790
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002791- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2792 big to represent as a C double.
2793
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002794- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2795 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2796 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2797 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2798 restriction).
2799
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002800- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2801 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2802 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2803 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2804 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2805
2806 >>> dir([])
2807 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2808 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2809 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2810 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2811 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2812 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2813 'reverse', 'sort']
2814
2815 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2816
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002817- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002818 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2819 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2820 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2821 OverflowError exception.
2822
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002823- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002824 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002825 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2826 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2827 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2828 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2829 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002830 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002831 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2832 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2833
2834 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2835 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2836 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2837 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002838
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002839- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002840 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2841 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2842 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2843 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2844 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2845 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2846 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2847 once it is created.
2848
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002849- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2850 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2851 (key, value) pairs.
2852
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002853- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002854 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2855 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2856
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002857- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2858 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2859 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2860 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2861 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002862
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002863- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002864 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2865 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2866
2867 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2868
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002869- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002870 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2871
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002872Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002873-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002874
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002875- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002876 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2877 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002878
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002879- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2880 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2881 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2882 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2883 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2884 in this area anymore).
2885
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002886- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2887 threading.Timer.
2888
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002889- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2890 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2891
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002892- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002893 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2894
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002895- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002896 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2897 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2898 converted to Python longs.
2899
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002900- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002901 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2902
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002903- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2904 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2905 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2906
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002907Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002908-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002909
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002910- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2911 division operators as per PEP 238.
2912
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002913Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002914-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002915
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002916- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2917 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2918 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2919 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2920
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002921C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002922-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002923
2924- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002925
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002926- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2927 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002928 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002929
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002930 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2931 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002932 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002933 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002934
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002935- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002936 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2937 module:
2938
2939 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002940
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002941 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2942 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002943
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002944 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2945 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002946
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002947 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2948
2949 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2950
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002951- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002952 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2953 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2954 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002955
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002956New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002957-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002958
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002959- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2960 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2961 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2962 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2963 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002964
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002965Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002966-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002967
2968Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002969-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002970
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002971- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2972 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2973 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2974 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002975 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2976 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2977 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2978 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2979 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002980
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002981- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002982 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2983
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002984
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002985What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2986===========================
2987
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2989
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002990Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002991-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002992
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002993- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2994 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2995
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002996- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2997 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2998 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002999
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003000- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3001 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3002 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3003 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003004
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003005- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3006
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003007- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003008
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003009Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003011
3012- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003013 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003014 the module docstring for details.
3015
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003016Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003018
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003019- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003020 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3021 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3022 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003023
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003024- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3025 Nick Mathewson.
3026
3027Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003028----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003029
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003030- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3031 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3032 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3033 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3034 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3035 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3036 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3037 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3038
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003039- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3040 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3041 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3042 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3043
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003044- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3045 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3046 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3047 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3048 come a long way).
3049
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003050- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3051 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3052 write filters for these warnings).
3053
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003054- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3055 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3056 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3057 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3058 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3059
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003060- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3061 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3062 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3063 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3064 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3065 older distribution.
3066
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003067Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003068-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003069
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003070- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3071 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003072 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003073
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003074- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3075 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3076 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3077
3078- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3079
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003080- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3081
3082- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3083
3084- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3085
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003086- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003087
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003088- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3089
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003090New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003091-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003092
3093C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003094-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003095
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003096- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3097 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3098 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3099 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3100 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3101 against buffer overruns.
3102
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003103- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003104 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3105 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003106 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3107 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3108 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3109
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003110- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3111 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3112 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3113 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3114 deprecated.
3115
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003116Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003117-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003118
3119- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3120 relevant is found.
3121
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003122
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003123What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003124===========================
3125
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003126*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3127
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003128Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003129----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003130
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003131- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3132 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3133 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3134 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3135 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3136 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3137 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3138 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003139 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003140 repaired.
3141
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003142- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003143 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003144 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3145 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3146 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3147 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3148 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3149 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3150 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3151 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3152
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003153- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3154 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3155 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3156 leading BMO character).
3157
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003158- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3159 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3160 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3161
3162 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3163 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3164 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003165
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003166 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3167 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3168 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3169 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3170 for various simple to use conversions.
3171
3172 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3173 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3174
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003175 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3176 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3177 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3178 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3179 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3180 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3181 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3182 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3183 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3184 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3185 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3186 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3187 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3188 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3189 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003190
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003191- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3192 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3193 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003194 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003195 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003196
3197 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003198 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3199 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3200 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3201 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3202 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003203 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3204 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003205
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003206 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3207 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3208 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003209 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003210
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003211- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3212 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3213 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3214 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3215 floating arithmetic,
3216
3217 x = 9007199254740992.0
3218 print long(x)
3219
3220 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3221 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3222 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3223 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3224 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3225 functions are of good quality).
3226
3227 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3228 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3229 algorithms to break.
3230
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003231- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3232 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3233 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3234 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3235 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3236 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3237 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3238 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3239 order.
3240
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003241- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3242 operation along the most common code paths.
3243
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003244- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3245 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3246
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003247- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3248 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3249 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3250 {}.update(UserDict())
3251
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003252- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3253 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3254 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3255 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3256 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3257 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3258 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3259 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3260
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003261- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003262 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003263
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003264 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003265 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3266 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003267 join() method of strings
3268 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003269 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3270 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003272 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003273
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003274- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3275 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3276
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003277- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3278 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3279
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003280- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3281 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3282 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3283 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3284
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003285- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3286 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003287 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003288 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3289 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003290
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003291- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3292
3293
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003294Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003296
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003297- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003298 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003299 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3300 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3301
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003302- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3303 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3304
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003305- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3306 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3307 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3308 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3309
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003310- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3311 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3312 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3313
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003314- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3315
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003316- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3317
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003318- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3319 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3320 that are still imported into string.py).
3321
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003322- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3323
3324- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3325 Now it does.
3326
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003327- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3328
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003329- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3330 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3331 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3332 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3333 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003334 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3335 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003336
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003337- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3338 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3339 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3340 'help(object)'.
3341
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003342Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003344
3345- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003346 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003347 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3348 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3349
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003350- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003351 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3352 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003353
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003354C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003355-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003356
3357- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3358 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003359
3360----
3361
3362**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**