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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
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000015- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
16 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
17
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000018- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
19 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
20 modified the list.
21
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000022- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
23 functions is now writable.
24
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000025- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
26 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
27 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
28 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
29
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000030- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
31 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
32 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
33 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
34 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000035
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000036- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
37 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
38
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000039Extension modules
40-----------------
41
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000042- Added socket.socketpair().
43
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000044Library
45-------
46
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +000047- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
48 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
49
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000050- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
51 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
52 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
53 than creating a new one.
54
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +000055- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
56 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
57 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
58 and exponent.
59
60- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
61
62- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
63 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
64 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
65
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000066- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
67 to the readline module.
68
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000069- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000070 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
71 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000072
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000073- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
74 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
75 contains symlinks.
76
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000077- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
78 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
79
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +000080- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
81 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
82 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
83
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000084- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
85 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
86 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
87 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
88 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
89 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
90 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
91 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
92 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
93 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
94 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
95 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
96 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
97
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +000098- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
99
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000100Tools/Demos
101-----------
102
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000103- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
104 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
105
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000106- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
107
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000108Build
109-----
110
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000111- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
112 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
113
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000114- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
115 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
116
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000117- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
118 GNU/k*BSD systems.
119
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000120C API
121-----
122
123Documentation
124-------------
125
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000126- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if it contains
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000127symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment since 1992, but is now in
128the library reference as well.
129
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000130New platforms
131-------------
132
133Tests
134-----
135
136Windows
137-------
138
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000139- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
140 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
141 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
142 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
143 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
144 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
145 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
146 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
147 the problem.
148
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000149Mac
150---
151
152
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000153What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
154=================================
155
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000156*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000157
158Core and builtins
159-----------------
160
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000161- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
162 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
163 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
164 sensitive code.
165
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000166- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
167 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
168 @staticmethod
169 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000170 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000171
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000172- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
173 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
174 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
175 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
176 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
177 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
178 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
179 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
180 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
181 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
182 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
183
184 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
185 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
186 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
187 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
188 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
189 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
190 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
191
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000192- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
193 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
194
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000195- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000196 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000197
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000198- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000199 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000200 which was missing for no apparent reason.
201
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000202- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000203 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
204 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
205
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000206- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
207 types that support garbage collection.
208
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000209- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
210
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000211- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
212 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
213 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
214 Jython.
215
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000216- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
217
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000218- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
219 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
220
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000221- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
222 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
223 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000224
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000225- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
226 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
227 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
228
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000229Extension modules
230-----------------
231
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000232- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
233
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000234Library
235-------
236
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000237- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
238 TIS-620
239
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000240- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
241 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
242 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
243 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
244 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
245 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
246 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
247 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
248 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
249 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
250
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000251- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
252
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000253- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
254 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
255 same as when the argument is omitted).
256 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
257
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000258- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
259
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000260- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
261 schemes are offered.
262
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000263- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
264
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000265- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
266 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
267 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
268
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000269- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
270
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000271- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
272 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
273
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000274- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
275 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
276 when dummy_threading is being used.
277
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000278- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
279 from a tarfile.
280
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000281- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000282 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000283
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000284- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
285 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
286 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
287 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
288
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000289- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
290 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
291
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000292- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
293 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
294 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
295 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
296 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
297 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
298 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
299 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
300 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
301 by some other method in progress).
302
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000303- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
304 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
305 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000306
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000307- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
308
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000309- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
310 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
311 AM Kuchling.
312
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000313- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
314 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
315 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
316
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000317- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
318 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
319 instead of unsigned.
320
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000321- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000322 no longer part of the public API.
323
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000324- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
325 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
326 string methods of the same name).
327
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000328- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000329 SF patch 945642.
330
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000331- doctest unittest integration improvements:
332
333 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
334
335 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
336 DocTestSuites.
337
338- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
339 that provide thread-local data.
340
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000341- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
342 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
343
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000344- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
345
346- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
347 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
348 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
349
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000350- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
351
352 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
353 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
354 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000355
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000356 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
357 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
358 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
359 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
360
361 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
362 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
363
364 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
365 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
366 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
367 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
368
369 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
370 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
371 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
372 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
373 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
374
375 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
376 wrapping help output.
377
378 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
379 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
380 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000381
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000382C API
383-----
384
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000385- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
386 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
387 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
388 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
389 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
390 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
391 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
392 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
393 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
394 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
395 its visible semantics have not changed.
396
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000397- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
398 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
399
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000400Documentation
401-------------
402
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000403- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000404
405 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000406 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000407
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000408 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000409
410 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
411
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000412- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000413
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000414Tests
415-----
416
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000417- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000418 platforms that use the Makefile.
419
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000420- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
421 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
422 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
423
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000424
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000425What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
426=================================
427
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000428*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000429
430Core and builtins
431-----------------
432
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000433- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
434 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
435 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
436 objects now (one object instead of three).
437
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000438- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
439 Windows DLLs.
440
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000441- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
442 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000443
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000444- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
445 a new .pyc magic.
446
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000447- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
448 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
449 be there.
450
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000451- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
452 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
453 the LC_NUMERIC category.
454
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000455- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
456 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
457 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
458
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000459- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
460
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000461- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
462 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
463 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000464
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000465- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
466 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
467
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000468- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
469
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000470- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000471 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000472
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000473- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
474
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000475- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
476
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000477- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
478 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
479
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000480- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
481 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
482 Fixes bug #858016 .
483
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000484- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
485 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
486 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
487
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000488- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
489 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
490 improves their performance (about 35%).
491
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000492- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
493 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
494 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
495
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000496- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
497 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
498 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
499 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
500
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000501- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
502 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
503 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
504 length is not known).
505
506- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
507 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000508 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
509 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000510 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
511
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000512- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
513 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
514
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000515- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
516 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
517 keyword arguments.
518
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000519- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
520 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
521 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
522
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000523- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
524 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
525 cases.
526
527- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
528 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
529 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
530 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
531 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
532 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
533 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
534 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
535 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
536 a release build.
537
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000538- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
539 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
540
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000541- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000542 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000543
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000544- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
545 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
546 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
547 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
548 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
549 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
550 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
551 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
552 destroyed.
553
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000554- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
555 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
556 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
557 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
558 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
559 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
560 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
561 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
562
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000563- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
564 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
565 character other than a space.
566
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000567- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
568 by the function object or by the method object, the function
569 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
570 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
571 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
572 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
573 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
574 attributes with the same name.
575
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000576- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
577 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
578 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
579 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
580 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
581 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
582 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
583 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
584 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
585 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
586 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
587 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
588 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
589 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000590
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000591- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
592 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
593 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
594 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
595 This has been repaired.
596
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000597- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
598
599- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
600
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000601- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
602 over a sequence.
603
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000604- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000605 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000606
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000607- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
608
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000609- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
610 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
611 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
612 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
613 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
614 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
615 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
616 records with equal keys is unchanged).
617
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000618- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
619 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
620 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
621
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000622- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
623 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
624 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
625 freelist.
626
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000627- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
628 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
629
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000630- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
631 number.
632
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000633- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
634 a TypeError exception.
635
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000636- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
637 820195.
638
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000639- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
640 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
641 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
642
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000643- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000644 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
645 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000646
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000647- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
648 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
649 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
650
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000651- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
652 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000653 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000654
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000655- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000656 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
657 the first call.
658
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000659
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000660Extension modules
661-----------------
662
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000663- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
664 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
665
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000666- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
667 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
668 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
669 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
670 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
671 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
672 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000673
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000674- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
675
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000676- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
677
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000678- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
679 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
680
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000681- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
682 fewer false positives.
683
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000684- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
685 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
686
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000687- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000688 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
689
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000690- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000691 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000692 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
693 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
694 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000695
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000696- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
697 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
698 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
699 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
700
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000701- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
702 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
703 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
704 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
705 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
706 #897625.
707
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000708- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
709 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
710
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000711- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
712 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
713 and pops on either side of the deque.
714
715- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
716 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
717
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000718- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
719 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
720 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
721 other functions that expect a function argument.
722
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000723- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
724
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000725- os.getsid was added.
726
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000727- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
728 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
729 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
730
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000731- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
732
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000733- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
734
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000735- readline.clear_history was added.
736
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000737- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
738
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000739- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
740
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000741- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
742
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000743- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
744
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000745- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
746
747- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
748
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000749- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
750
751- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
752
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000753- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
754 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
755 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
756
757- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
758 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
759 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
760 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
761 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
762 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
763 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
764
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000765- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
766 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
767 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
768 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000769
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000770- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000771 iterators from a single iterable.
772
773- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
774 of raising a TypeError exception.
775
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000776- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
777 as parameter.
778
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000779Library
780-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000781
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000782- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
783 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
784 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000785
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000786- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
787 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
788 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000789
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000790- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000791
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000792- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
793 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000794
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000795- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
796 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
797
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000798- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
799
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000800- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000801 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000802
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000803- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
804 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
805
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000806- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
807
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000808- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
809 on cygwin and mingw32.
810
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000811- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
812
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000813- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
814 module.
815
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000816- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
817 installation scheme for all platforms.
818
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000819- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000820 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000821
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000822- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
823 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
824 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
825
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000826- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
827 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
828 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
829
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000830- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
831
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000832- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
833
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000834- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
835 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
836
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000837- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
838 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
839 type pattern with the same value exists.
840
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000841- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
842 when run from the command prompt).
843
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000844- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
845 not taken into consideration when caching value.
846
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000847- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
848 default sort).
849
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000850- Added global runctx function to profile module
851
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000852- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
853
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000854- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
855
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000856- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
857
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000858- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000859 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
860 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
861 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
862 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
863 accordingly.
864
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000865- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
866 decoding standards.
867
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000868- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
869 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
870 called for all requests.
871
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000872- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
873 they are passed to the compiler.
874
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000875- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
876 indent, width and depth.
877
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000878- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
879 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
880
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000881- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
882 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
883
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000884- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
885
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000886- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
887
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000888- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
889
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000890- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
891 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
892
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000893- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000894 for better performance.
895
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000896- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000897
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000898- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
899 a string).
900
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000901- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
902
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000903- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
904
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000905- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
906
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000907- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
908
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000909- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
910 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
911 list of fieldnames.
912
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000913- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
914 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
915
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000916- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
917
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000918- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
919 empty lists.
920
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000921- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
922 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
923 and shelves.
924
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000925- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
926 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
927
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000928- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000929 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
930 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000931
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000932- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
933 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000934 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000935
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000936- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000937 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
938 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
939
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000940- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
941 and removed in Py2.4.
942
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000943- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
944
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000945- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
946
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000947Tools/Demos
948-----------
949
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000950- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
951 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
952
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000953- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
954
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000955- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
956 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
957 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
958 destination in situations where both files are given.
959
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000960- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
961 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
962 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
963 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
964
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000965- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
966
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000967- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
968 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
969 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
970 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
971 now.
972
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000973- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
974 in effect
975
976- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
977 C-c C-h
978
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000979- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
980 -d option was given.
981
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000982Build
983-----
984
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000985- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
986 build under OS X.
987
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000988- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
989 --enable-profiling.
990
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000991- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
992 is configured --with-tsc.
993
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000994- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
995 on AMD64.
996
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000997- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
998 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
999
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001000- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1001 removed.
1002
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001003- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1004 supported (see PEP 11).
1005
1006- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1007
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001008- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1009
1010- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1011 (see PEP 11).
1012
1013- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1014 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1015
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001016C API
1017-----
1018
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001019- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1020 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1021 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1022
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001023- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1024 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1025 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1026 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1027
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001028- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1029 generator objects.
1030
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001031- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1032 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001033 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1034 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001035
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001036- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1037 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1038
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001039- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1040 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1041 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1042 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1043 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1044
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001045- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1046 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1047 about 10% faster.
1048
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001049- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1050 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1051
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001052- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1053 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1054 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1055 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1056
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001057Windows
1058-------
1059
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001060- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1061 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1062 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1063 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1064
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001065- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1066 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1067 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1068
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001069
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001070What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1071===============================
1072
1073*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1074
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001075IDLE
1076----
1077
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001078- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1079 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1080 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1081 context-menu actions.
1082
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001083- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1084 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1085 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1086 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1087 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1088 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1089 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1090 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1091 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1092
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001093
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001094What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1095=============================================
1096
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001097*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001098
1099Core and builtins
1100-----------------
1101
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001102- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001103 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001104 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1105
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001106Extension modules
1107-----------------
1108
1109- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1110 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1111 than once. This has been fixed.
1112
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001113- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1114 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1115 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1116 call.
1117
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001118- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1119
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001120Library
1121-------
1122
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001123- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1124 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1125
1126- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1127 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1128 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1129 restored.
1130
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001131IDLE
1132----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001133
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001134- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001135
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001136Build
1137-----
1138
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001139- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1140 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1141
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001142C API
1143-----
1144
1145Windows
1146-------
1147
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001148- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1149 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1150
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001151- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1152
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001153Mac
1154---
1155
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001156- Various fixes to pimp.
1157
1158- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1159
1160- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1161 more problems than it solves.
1162
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001163
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001164What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1165=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001166
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001167*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1168
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001169Core and builtins
1170-----------------
1171
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001172- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1173 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1174
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001175- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1176 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001177 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001178
1179- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1180 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1181 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001182 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001183
1184- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1185 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001186
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001187- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1188 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1189 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1190
1191- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001192 770247.
1193
1194- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001195
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001196Extension modules
1197-----------------
1198
1199- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1200 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1201
1202- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1203
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001204- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1205
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001206- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1207 contained within the _strptime module.
1208
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001209- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1210 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1211
1212- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001213 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1214
1215- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1216 the find_class attribute, if present.
1217
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001218- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001219
1220 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1221 (SF bug 763298).
1222
1223 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001224 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1225 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1226 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001227
1228 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1229
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001230Library
1231-------
1232
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001233- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1234
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001235- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1236 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1237 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1238 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1239 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1240 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1241 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1242 or Tester().
1243
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001244- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1245 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1246 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1247 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1248 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1249 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1250 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1251 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1252 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001253
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001254 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001255
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001256- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1257 weren't before was an oversight.
1258
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001259- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1260 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1261
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001262- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1263 when there are no lines.
1264
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001265- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1266 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1267
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001268- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1269 to child processes.
1270
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001271- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1272
1273- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1274
1275- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1276 xmlrpclib.
1277
1278- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1279 responses.
1280
1281- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1282 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1283
1284- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1285 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1286 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1287
1288- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1289 used as patterns.
1290
1291- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1292 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1293 than Tk 8.3.
1294
1295- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1296
1297- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001298
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001299Tools/Demos
1300-----------
1301
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001302- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1303
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001304- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1305
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001306- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001307
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001308Build
1309-----
1310
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001311- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1312
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001313- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1314
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001315- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1316 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001317
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001318- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1319 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1320 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001321
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001322C API
1323-----
1324
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001325- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1326 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1327
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001328Windows
1329-------
1330
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001331- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1332 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1333 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1334 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1335 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1336 Python exception ::
1337
1338 thread.error: can't start new thread
1339
1340 is raised now.
1341
1342- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1343 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1344 instead of from DLL teardown.
1345
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001346Mac
1347---
1348
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001349- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001350 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001351 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1352 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1353 the executable in the bundle.
1354
1355- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001356
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001357- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1358
1359- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1360 on Panther.
1361
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001362What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1363================================
1364
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001365*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001366
1367Core and builtins
1368-----------------
1369
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001370- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1371 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1372 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1373 with the -i option.
1374
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001375- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1376 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1377
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001378- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1379 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1380
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001381- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1382 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1383 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1384 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1385 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1386 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1387 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1388 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1389 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1390 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1391 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1392 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1393 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001394
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001395- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1396 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1397 embedded in a lambda expression.
1398
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001399- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1400 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1401 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1402 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1403 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1404
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001405- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1406 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1407 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1408
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001409- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1410 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1411
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001412- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1413 It's writable again.
1414
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001415- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1416 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1417 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001418 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001419
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001420- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1421 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1422 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1423
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001424Extension modules
1425-----------------
1426
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001427- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1428 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1429
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001430- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1431 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1432 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1433 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1434
1435- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1436 collection.
1437
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001438- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1439 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1440 unique within a single program run.
1441
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001442- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1443 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1444
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001445- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1446 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1447
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001448- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1449 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001450
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001451- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1452
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001453- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1454 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1455
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001456- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1457 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1458 for many BSD-derived systems.
1459
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001460
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001461Library
1462-------
1463
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001464- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1465 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1466 primary ones:
1467
1468 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1469 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1470 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1471
1472 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1473 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1474 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1475 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1476 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1477 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1478
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001479- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1480 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1481 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1482 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1483 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1484 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1485 argument.
1486
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001487- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1488 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1489 in the archive.
1490
1491- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1492 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1493
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001494- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1495 569574).
1496
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001497- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1498 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1499 no more.
1500
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001501- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1502 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1503 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1504 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1505 code coverage.
1506
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001507- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1508 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1509 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001510 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1511 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001512
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001513- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1514 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1515 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001516 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001517
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001518- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1519
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001520- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1521 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1522 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1523 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1524
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001525- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1526 handling.
1527
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001528- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1529 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1530
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001531- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1532 in socket.py.
1533
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001534- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1535
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001536- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1537 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1538 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1539 opener with proxy support.
1540
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001541- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1542
1543- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1544
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001545Tools/Demos
1546-----------
1547
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001548- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1549
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001550- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1551
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001552- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1553 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001554
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001555- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1556 files.
1557
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001558Build
1559-----
1560
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001561- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001562 different root directory.
1563
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001564C API
1565-----
1566
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001567- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1568 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1569 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1570 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1571 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1572 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1573 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1574 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1575 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1576 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1577
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001578- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1579 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1580 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1581 from Python.
1582
1583
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001584New platforms
1585-------------
1586
1587None this time.
1588
1589Tests
1590-----
1591
1592- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1593 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1594
1595Windows
1596-------
1597
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001598- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1599
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001600- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1601 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1602 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1603 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1604 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1605 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1606 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1607 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1608 that's what it's for.
1609
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001610Mac
1611---
1612
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001613- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1614 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1615 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1616 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001617- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1618 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1619- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001620
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001621SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1622------------------------------------
1623
1624430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1625598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1626622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1627661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1628683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1629697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1630713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1631724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1632727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1633729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1634730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1635731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1636732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1637733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1638735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1639740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1640744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1641745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1642747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1643749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1644751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1645753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1646755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1647757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1648760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1649
1650
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001651What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1652================================
1653
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001654*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001655
1656Core and builtins
1657-----------------
1658
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001659- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1660 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1661
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001662- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1663 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1664 and cannot be strings).
1665
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001666- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1667 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1668 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1669 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1670
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001671- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1672 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1673 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1674 Python itself.
1675
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001676- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1677 the referenced object, if it has one.
1678
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001679- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1680 the thread started at
1681 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1682
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001683- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1684 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1685 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1686 placed on a list index.
1687
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001688- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1689 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1690 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1691 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1692
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001693- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1694 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1695 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1696 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1697 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1698 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1699 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1700
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001701- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1702 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1703 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1704 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1705 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1706
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001707- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1708 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001709
1710- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1711 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1712 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1713 #693195.)
1714
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001715- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1716 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001717
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001718- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001719 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001720 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1721 interpreter executions, would fail.
1722
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001723- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001724 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001725 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001726
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001727Extension modules
1728-----------------
1729
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001730- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1731 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1732 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1733 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1734
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001735- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1736 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1737
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001738- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1739 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1740 and Greg Chapman.)
1741
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001742- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1743 recursively.
1744
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001745- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001746 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1747 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1748 leaks.
1749
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001750- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1751
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001752- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1753 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1754 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1755 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1756 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1757 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1758 #705836.
1759
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001760- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001761 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1762
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001763- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1764 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1765 See SF bug #692416.
1766
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001767- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1768 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1769
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001770- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1771 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1772 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001773
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001774- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001775 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1776 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1777
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001778- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1779 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1780 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1781 timeouts to work properly.
1782
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001783Library
1784-------
1785
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001786- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1787 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1788 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1789 future release.
1790
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001791- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1792 for querying platform dependent features.
1793
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001794- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001795
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001796- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1797 pickle protocol versions.
1798
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001799- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1800 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1801 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1802
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001803- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1804
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001805- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1806 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1807 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1808 modules.
1809
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001810- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1811 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1812 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1813
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001814- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1815 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1816
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001817- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1818 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1819 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1820
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001821- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001822 MS Office extensions.
1823
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001824- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1825 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1826
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001827- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1828 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1829
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001830- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1831 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1832 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1833 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1834 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1835 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1836
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001837- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1838 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1839 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001840
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001841- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1842 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1843 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1844
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001845- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1846
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001847- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1848 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1849 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1850
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001851Tools/Demos
1852-----------
1853
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001854- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1855 See the module docstring for details.
1856
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001857Build
1858-----
1859
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001860- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1861 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001862
1863C API
1864-----
1865
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001866- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1867
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001868- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1869 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1870 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1871
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001872- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1873 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001874
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001875 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1876 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1877 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001878
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001879- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001880 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1881
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001882- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1883 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1884 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001885
1886New platforms
1887-------------
1888
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001889None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001890
1891Tests
1892-----
1893
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001894- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1895 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001896
1897Windows
1898-------
1899
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001900- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1901 function.
1902
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001903- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1904 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001905
1906Mac
1907---
1908
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001909- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1910 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001911
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001912- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1913 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001914
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001915- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1916 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1917 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001918
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001919- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001920 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1921 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001922
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001923- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1924 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001925
1926
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001927What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1928=================================
1929
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001930*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001931
1932Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001933-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001934
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001935- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1936 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1937 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1938
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001939- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1940 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1941 (SF patch #664376.)
1942
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001943- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1944 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1945 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1946 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1947 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1948 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001949 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001950
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001951- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1952 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1953 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1954 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001955 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001956
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001957- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1958 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1959 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1960 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1961 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1962 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1963 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1964 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1965 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1966 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1967 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1968
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001969- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1970 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1971 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1972 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1973 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1974 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1975
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001976- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1977 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1978
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001979- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1980 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1981 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1982 case.)
1983
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001984- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1985 passed as unicode strings.
1986
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001987- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1988 See SF bug #683467.
1989
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001990- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1991 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1992
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001993- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1994
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001995- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1996
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001997- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1998 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1999 arguments.
2000
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002001- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2002 See SF bug #667147.
2003
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002004- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002005 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002006 See SF bug #676155.
2007
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002008- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002009 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002010 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2011 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2012 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2013 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2014 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2015 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002016
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002017Extension modules
2018-----------------
2019
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002020- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2021 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2022 tp_as_number pointer.
2023
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002024- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2025 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2026 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2027 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2028 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2029
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002030- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2031
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002032- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2033
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002034- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002035 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002036 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2037 patch #678531.)
2038
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002039- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2040 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2041
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002042- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2043 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2044
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002045- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2046
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002047- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2048 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2049 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2050
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002051- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2052
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002053- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2054 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2055
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002056- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002057
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002058- datetime changes:
2059
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002060 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2061
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002062 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2063 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2064 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2065 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2066 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2067 now.
2068
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002069 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002070 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2071 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002072
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002073 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002074 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002075 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2076 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2077 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2078 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002079
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002080 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2081 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2082 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002083 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2084
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002085 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2086 by a later example coded by Guido.
2087
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002088 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002089 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2090 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2091 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002092 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2093 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2094
2095 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2096 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2097 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2098 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2099 tzinfo subclass instance.
2100
2101 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2102 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2103 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2104 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2105 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2106 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2107 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2108 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002109
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002110 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2111 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2112 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2113 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2114 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002115 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2116
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002117 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002118
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002119 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2120 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2121 as a naive datetime object.
2122
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002123 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2124 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2125 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2126
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002127 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2128 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2129 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2130 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2131 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2132 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2133 comparison.
2134
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002135 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2136 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2137 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2138 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002139 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002140
2141 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002142
2143 and ::
2144
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002145 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2146
2147 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2148 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2149 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2150 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2151
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002152 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2153 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2154 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2155 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2156 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2157
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002158 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2159 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002160 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2161 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002162
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002163Library
2164-------
2165
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002166- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2167 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2168
2169- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2170 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2171 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2172 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2173 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2174 See PEP 307 for details.
2175
2176- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2177 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2178
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002179- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2180 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002181 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002182 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2183 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002184 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002185
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002186- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2187 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2188
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002189- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2190 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2191 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2192
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002193- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2194
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002195- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2196 exception.
2197
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002198- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2199 class.
2200
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002201- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2202 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2203 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2204
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002205- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2206 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2207
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002208- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002209 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2210 See SF bug #659228.
2211
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002212- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2213 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2214 See SF patch #651082.
2215
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002216- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002217
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002218- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2219 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2220
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002221- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002222 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002223
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002224- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2225 DOS paths from other platforms.
2226
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002227Tools/Demos
2228-----------
2229
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002230- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2231 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2232 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2233 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2234 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2235 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2236 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2237 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2238 example:
2239
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002240 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2241 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002242
2243 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2244
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002245
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002246Build
2247-----
2248
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002249- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2250 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2251 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002252 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2253
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002254 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2255
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002256- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2257 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2258 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2259 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2260 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2261 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2262 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2263 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2264 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2265
2266- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2267 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2268 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2269 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2270
2271- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2272 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2273
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002274C API
2275-----
2276
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002277- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2278 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002279
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002280- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2281 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2282 tp_as_number pointer.
2283
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002284- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2285 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2286 (SF #681367)
2287
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002288- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2289 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2290 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2291 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002292
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002293Tests
2294-----
2295
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002296- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002297 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2298 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2299 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2300 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2301 pydoc.)
2302
2303- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2304
2305- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002306
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002307Windows
2308-------
2309
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002310- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2311 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2312 time).
2313
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002314- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2315 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2316
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002317- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2318 release without strong cryptography.
2319
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002320- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002321 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002322
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002323- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2324 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2325
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002326Mac
2327---
2328
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002329- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2330 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002331
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002332- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2333 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2334 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002335
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002336- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2337 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002338
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002339- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2340 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2341 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2342 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002343
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002344- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002345 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2346 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2347 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002348
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002349
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002350What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002351=================================
2352
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002353*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002354
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002355Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002356--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002357
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002358- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2359
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002360- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2361 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002362 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002363 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002364 a different meaning than before.
2365
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002366- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002367 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002368 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002369
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002370- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002371 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002372 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002373
2374- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2375 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2376 and deallocation.
2377
2378- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2379 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2380
2381- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2382 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2383 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2384 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2385 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2386
2387- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2388 now detected by the garbage collector.
2389
2390- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2391 [SF bug 519621]
2392
2393- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2394 identifier.
2395
2396- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2397 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2398 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2399 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2400 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2401 [SF bug 563060]
2402
2403- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2404 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2405 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2406 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2407 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2408
2409- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2410 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2411 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2412
2413- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2414
2415- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2416 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2417 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2418 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2419 state of the slots would be lost.)
2420
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002421Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002422-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002423
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002424- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002425 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2426 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2427 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2428 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002429 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2430 Jython 2.1.
2431
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002432- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002433 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002434 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2435 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2436 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2437 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2438 these, see PEP 302.
2439
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002440- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2441 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2442 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2443
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002444- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2445 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2446 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2447
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002448- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2449 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2450 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2451
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002452- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2453 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2454 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2455 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2456 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2457 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2458 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2459 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2460 releases or implementations.
2461
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002462- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002463 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2464 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002465
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002466- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2467 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2468
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002469- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2470 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2471 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2472
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002473- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2474 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2475
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002476- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2477 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002478 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2479 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002480
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002481- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2482 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2483 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2484 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2485 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2486
2487 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2488 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2489 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2490 pattern.
2491
2492 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2493 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2494 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2495 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2496
2497 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2498 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2499 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2500 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2501 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2502 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2503
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002504- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2505 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2506 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2507 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2508 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2509 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2510 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2511 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002512
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002513- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2514 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2515 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2516 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2517 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002518 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2519 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2520 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2521 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2522 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2523 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2524 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002525
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002526- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2527 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2528
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002529- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2530 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2531 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2532 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2533 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2534 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2535 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2536 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2537 to Zack Weinberg!
2538
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002539- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2540 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2541 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2542 type. This has been fixed now.
2543
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002544- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2545 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2546 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2547
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002548- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2549 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2550 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2551 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2552 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2553 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2554 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2555 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002556 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002557
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002558- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2559 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2560 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002561
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002562- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2563 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2564 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2565 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2566 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2567 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2568 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2569 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002570 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002571 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2572 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2573
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002574- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2575 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2576 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2577 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2578 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2579 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2580 this.)
2581
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002582- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2583 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002584 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002585 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002586 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2587 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002588 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2589 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002590
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002591- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2592 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2593 currently running.
2594
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002595- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2596 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2597 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2598 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2599
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002600- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2601 as directory names.
2602
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002603- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2604 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2605
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002606- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2607 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2608
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002609- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002610 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2611 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002612
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002613- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2614 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2615 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2616 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2617 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2618
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002619- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2620 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2621 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2622 removed.
2623
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002624- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2625 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2626 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2627
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002628- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2629 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2630 to __debug__.
2631
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002632- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2633 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2634 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2635
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002636- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2637 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2638 deprecated now.
2639
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002640- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2641 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2642 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002643
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002644- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2645 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2646 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2647 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2648 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002649
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002650- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2651 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2652
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002653- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2654 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2655 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002656 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002657 is backward compatible.
2658
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002659- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2660 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2661 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2662 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2663 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2664
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002665- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2666 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2667 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2668 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2669 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2670 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002671
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002672- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2673 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2674
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002675- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2676 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2677
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002678- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2679 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2680 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2681 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2682 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2683
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002684- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2685 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2686 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2687
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002688- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002689 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2690
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002691- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2692 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2693 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002694
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002695- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2696 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2697
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002698- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2699 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2700 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2701
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002702- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2703
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002704Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002705-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002706
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002707- Added three operators to the operator module:
2708 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2709 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2710 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2711
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002712- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2713
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002714- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2715 archives.
2716
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002717- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2718 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2719 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2720
2721 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2722
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002723- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2724 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2725 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002726 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002727
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002728- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2729 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2730 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2731 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002732 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2733 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2734 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2735 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002736
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002737- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2738 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002739
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002740- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2741
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002742- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2743 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2744
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002745- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2746 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2747 supported.
2748
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002749- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2750
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002751- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2752 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002753
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002754- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2755 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2756
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002757- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2758
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002759- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2760 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2761
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002762- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2763 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2764 functions but callable type objects.
2765
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002766- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002767 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002768 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002769
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002770- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2771 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002772
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002773- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2774 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002775
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002776- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2777 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2778 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2779 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2780
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002781- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2782 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002783
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002784- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2785 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2786 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2787 and __imul__.
2788
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002789- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002790 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2791 is called.
2792
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002793- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2794 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2795 interpreter was compiled.
2796
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002797- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2798 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2799 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002800 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002801 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2802 1, not 2.
2803
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002804- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2805 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2806 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2807 limit.
2808
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002809- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2810 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2811 bug #623464.
2812
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002813- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2814 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2815 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2816 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2817
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002818Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002819-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002820
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002821- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2822
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002823- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2824 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2825 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2826 with Python 2.3a2.
2827
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002828- os.path exposes getctime.
2829
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002830- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002831 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002832 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002833 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002834 unit tests of floating point results.
2835
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002836- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2837 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2838 has been increased.
2839
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002840- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2841 executed.
2842
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002843- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2844 postinstallation script.
2845
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002846- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2847 test the current module.
2848
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002849- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002850 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2851 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2852 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2853 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2854
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002855- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002856 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002857 Ward's Optik package.
2858
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002859- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2860 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2861 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2862 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2863
2864- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2865 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002866 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002867
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002868- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2869 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2870 shelf are binary pickles.
2871
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002872- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2873 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2874
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002875- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2876 modules are iterators now.
2877
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002878- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2879 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2880 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2881 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2882 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2883 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002884
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002885- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2886 with their entity value.
2887
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002888- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2889
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002890- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2891 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002892
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002893- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2894 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002895 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002896
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002897- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2898 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2899 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2900 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2901 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2902 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2903 main():
2904
2905 import locale
2906 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2907
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002908- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2909 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2910
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002911- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2912 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2913 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2914 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2915 to the new standard.
2916
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002917- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2918 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2919 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2920 an extension to the database.
2921
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002922- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2923 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2924 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2925 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002926 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002927
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002928- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002929 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002930
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002931- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2932 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2933 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2934 bounded integers.
2935
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002936- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2937 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2938 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2939 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2940 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2941 in existence.
2942
2943 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2944 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2945 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2946 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2947 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2948 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2949
2950 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2951 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2952 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2953 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2954
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002955- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2956 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2957 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2958
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002959- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2960
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002961- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2962 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2963 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2964 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2965
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002966- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2967 argument.
2968
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002969- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2970 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2971 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2972 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2973 [SF patch 560794].
2974
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002975- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2976 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2977 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002978 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2979 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2980 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002981
2982- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2983 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002984
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002985- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2986 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2987 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2988 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002989
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002990- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2991 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2992 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2993 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2994 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2995
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002996- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002997
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002998- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2999
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003000- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3001 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3002 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3003 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3004 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3005 identical to None.
3006
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003007- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3008 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3009 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3010 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3011 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3012 results now.
3013
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003014- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3015 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3016
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003017- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3018 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3019 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3020 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3021 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3022 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3023 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3024 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3025
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003026- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3027
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003028- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3029 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3030
3031- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3032 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3033 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3034 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3035 and other systems.
3036
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003037- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3038 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3039 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3040 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 +00003041 work well with these.
3042
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003043- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3044
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003045- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003046 connections.
3047
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003048- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3049 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3050 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3051
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003052- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3053 sets
3054
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003055- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3056 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3057 name.
3058
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003059- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3060 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3061 passed in.
3062
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003063- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003064 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003065 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3066 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003067
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003068- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3069
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003070- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3071
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003072- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3073 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3074 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3075
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003076- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3077 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3078 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3079 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003080 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003081
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003082- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003083 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003084 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003085
3086- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3087 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3088 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3089
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003090- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003091 the value of its expression argument.
3092
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003093- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3094 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3095 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3096
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003097- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3098 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3099 skipstone browser was included.
3100
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003101- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3102 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3103
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003104Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003105-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003106
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003107- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3108 names in addition to accepting file names.
3109
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003110- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3111 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3112 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3113 still used and useful.)
3114
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003115- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3116 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3117 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3118 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003119
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003120- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3121 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3122 the generated binary.
3123
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003124Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003125-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003126
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003127- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3128
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003129- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3130 except in the hands of experts.
3131
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003132- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003133 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3134 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3135 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003136
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003137- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3138 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3139 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3140 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3141 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3142 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3143 builds.
3144
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003145- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3146 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3147 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3148 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3149 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3150 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3151 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3152 new type.
3153
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003154- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003155
3156 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3157 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3158 positive infinities.
3159
3160 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3161 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3162 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3163 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3164 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3165 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3166 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3167
3168 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3169
3170 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3171
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003172- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3173 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3174 size of the executable.
3175
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003176- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3177 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3178 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3179 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003180
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003181- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3182
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003183- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3184 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3185 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003186
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003187- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3188 well as Unix.
3189
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003190- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3191 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3192 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3193 modules in the README file for details.
3194
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003195C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003196-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003197
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003198- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3199 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003200 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003201 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003202 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003203
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003204- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3205 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3206 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3207 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3208 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3209 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003210 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003211 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3212 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3213 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3214 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3215 aligned.)
3216
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003217- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3218 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3219 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3220
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003221- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3222 level.
3223
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003224- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3225 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3226 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3227 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3228 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3229
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003230- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3231 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3232 code.
3233
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003234- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3235 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3236 adjusting for negative indices.
3237
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003238- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3239 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3240 object.
3241
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003242- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3243 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3244 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3245
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003246- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3247 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003248
3249- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3250
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003251- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3252 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3253 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3254 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3255
3256- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3257
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003258- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003259
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003260- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003261 without going through the buffer API.
3262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003263- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003264
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003265- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3266 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3267 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3268 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3269
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003270- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3271 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3272
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003273- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003274 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3275
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003276New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003277-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003278
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003279- OpenVMS is now supported.
3280
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003281- AtheOS is now supported.
3282
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003283- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3284
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003285- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3286
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003287Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288-----
3289
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003290- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3291 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3292 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003293
3294Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003296
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003297- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3298 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3299 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3300 bugs.
3301 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003302 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003303 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3304 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003305 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003306
3307- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003308 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003309
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003310- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3311 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3312
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003313- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3314 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003315 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003316 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3317
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003318- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3319 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3320 use files" uninstall option).
3321
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003322- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3323
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003324- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3325 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3326
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003327- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3328 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3329 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3330
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003331- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3332 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3333 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3334 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3335 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003336 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3337 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3338 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003339
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003340- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003341 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003342 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3343 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3344 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3345 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3346 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3347 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3348 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3349 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3350 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3351 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3352 work around.
3353
3354- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3355 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3356 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3357 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3358 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3359 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3360 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3361 specified with O_CREAT too).
3362
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003363Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003364----
3365
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003366- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003367
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003368- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3369 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3370 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3371
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003372- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3373 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3374 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3375
3376- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3377 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3378 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3379 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3380 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3381 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3382 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3383 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003384
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003385- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3386 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3387 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003388
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003389- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3390 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3391 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3392 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3393 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003394
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003395- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3396 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3397 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003398
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003399- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3400 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003401
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003402- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3403 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3404 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3405 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3406 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003407
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003408- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3409 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3410 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3411
3412- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3413 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3414 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003415
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003416- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3417 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3418 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3419 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003420 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003421
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003422- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3423 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003424
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003425- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3426 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003427
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003428- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003429 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003430 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3431 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003432
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003433
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003434What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003435===============================
3436
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003437*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3438
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003439Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003440--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003441
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003442- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3443 with a custom metaclass.
3444
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003445Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003446-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003447
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003448- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3449 are proxies.
3450
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003451Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003452-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003453
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003454- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3455 very short strings.
3456
3457- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3458 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3459 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3460 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3461 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3462
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003463Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003464-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003465
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003466- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3467 close or delete time).
3468
3469- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3470 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3471
3472- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3473
3474- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003475 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003476
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003477Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003478-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003479
3480Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003481-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003482
3483C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003484-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003485
3486New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003488
3489Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003491
3492Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003494
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003495- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3496
3497- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3498 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3499
3500- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3501 deleted at process exit time.
3502
3503- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3504 in backslash.
3505
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003506Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003508
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003509- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3510 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3511 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3512
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003513
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003514What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003515===========================
3516
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3518
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003519Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003521
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003522- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3523 been extensively updated. See
3524
3525 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3526
3527 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3528
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003529- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3530 deleted!
3531
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003532- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3533 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3534 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3535 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3536 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3537
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003538- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3539
3540 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3541 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3542
3543 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3544 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3545 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3546 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3547 supported anyway.
3548
3549 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3550 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3551
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003552- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3553 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3554 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3555 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3556 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003557
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003558- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3559 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3560 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3561
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003562Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003563-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003564
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003565- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3566 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3567 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3568 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3569 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3570 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003571 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3572 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3573 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3574 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003575
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003576- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3577 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3578 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3579
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003580Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003582
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003583- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3584
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003585Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003586-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003587
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003588- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3589 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3590 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3591 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3592 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3593 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3594
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003595- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3596
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003597- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3598
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003599- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3600
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003601- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3602 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3603 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3604
3605- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3606
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003607Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003609
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003610- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3611 off a search on Google.
3612
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003613Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003615
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003616- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3617 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3618 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3619 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3620 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3621 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3622 other platforms should do likewise.
3623
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003624- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3625 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3626 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3627
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003628C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003630
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003631- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3632 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3633 producing key-value pairs.
3634
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003635- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003636 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003637 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3638 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3639 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3640 previously went unchallenged.
3641
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003642New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003644
3645Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003647
3648Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003650
3651Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003652----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003653
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003654- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3655 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003656
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003657- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3658 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3659 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3660 home.
3661
3662
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003663What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003664===========================
3665
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003666*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3667
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003668Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003669--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003670
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003671- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3672 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003673
3674 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003675 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003676
3677 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3678 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003679 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003680 This needs to be documented.
3681
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003682- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3683 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3684
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003685- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3686 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3687 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3688
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003689- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3690 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3691
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003692- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3693 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3694 class forbids it).
3695
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003696- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3697 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3698 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3699
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003700- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3701
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003702Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003703-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003704
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003705- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3706 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003707 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003708
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003709- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3710 (like 1 + '').
3711
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003712Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003713-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003714
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003715- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3716 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3717 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3718 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003719 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003720 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3721
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003722- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3723 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3724 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3725 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3726
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003727- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3728 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003729 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3730 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3731 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003732
3733- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3734 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003735
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003736- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3737 bytes on its input.
3738
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003739Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003740-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003741
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003742- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003743 convenience function.
3744
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003745- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3746 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3747 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003748 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3749 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3750 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3751 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3752 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3753 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003754
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003755- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3756 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3757 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3758 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3759
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003760- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3761 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3762 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3763
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003764- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3765 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3766 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3767 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3768
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003769- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3770 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003772 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3773 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3774 new -l and -e options.
3775
3776- statcache is now deprecated.
3777
3778- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3779 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003781 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3782 time properly taken into account.
3783
3784- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3785 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3786 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3787 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3788
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003789Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003790-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003791
3792Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003793-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003794
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003795- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3796 is built with libdb3 if available.
3797
3798- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3799
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003800C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003801-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003802
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003803- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3804 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3805 PySequence_Size().
3806
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003807- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3808
3809- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3810 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3811 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3812
3813- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3814 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3815
3816- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3817 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3818
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003819New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003820-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003821
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003822- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3823 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3824
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003825- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3826 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3827
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003828- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3829
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003830Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003832
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003833- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3834 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3835
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003836Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003838
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003839Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003841
3842- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3843 removed completely in the next release.
3844
3845- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3846 OSX.
3847
3848- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3849 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3850
3851- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3852
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003853
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003854What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003855===========================
3856
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003857*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3858
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003859Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003860--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003861
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003862- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003863 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003864 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003865 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3866 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003867 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3868 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003869 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3870 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003871
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003872- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3873 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3874
3875- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3876 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3877
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003878Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003880
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003881- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3882 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3883 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3884 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3885 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3886 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3887 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3888 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3889
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003890- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3891 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3892 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3893 example).
3894
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003895- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003896 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003897 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003898 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003899
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003900- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3901 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3902 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003903 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003904
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003905- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3906 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3907 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3908 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3909 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3910 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3911
3912 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3913
3914 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3915
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003916Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003918
3919- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3920
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003921- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3922
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003923- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3924 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003925
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003926- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3927 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3928 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3929 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3930 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3931 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003932 attributes.
3933
3934- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3935 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3936 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003937
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003938- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3939 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3940 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003941
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003942- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3943 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3944 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003945 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3946 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3947
3948- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3949 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003950
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003951Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003952-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003953
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003954- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3955 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3956
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003957- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3958 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3959 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3960 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3961
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003962- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3963 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3964 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3965 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3966
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003967 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3968 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3969 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3970 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3971 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3972 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3973 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3974 without losing information).
3975
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003976- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003977 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3978 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3979 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3980 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3981 module).
3982
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003983 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003984 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3985 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3986 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3987 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003988
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003989- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003990 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3991 encoding.
3992
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003993- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3994 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3995
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003997 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3998
3999- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4000 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4001 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4002 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4003
4004- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4005
4006- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4007 ON, and OFF.
4008
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004009- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4010 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4011
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004012Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004014
4015- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4016 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4017 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004018
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004019- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4020 been added: -X and -E.
4021
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004022Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004024
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004025- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4026 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4027
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004028C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004029-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004030
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004031- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4032 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4033 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4034 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4035 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4036
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004037- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4038 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4039 as long) arguments.
4040
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004041- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4042 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4043 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4044 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4045 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4046 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4047
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004048- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4049 input.
4050
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004051New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004053
4054Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004056
4057Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004059
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004060- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4061 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4062 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4063
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004064- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4065 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4066 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004067 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004068
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004069 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4070 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4071 import signal
4072 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004073
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004075 while 1:
4076 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004077 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004078 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4079 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4080 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4081 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004082
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004083
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004084What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4085===========================
4086
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4088
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004089Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004091
4092- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4093 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4094 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4095
4096- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4097 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4098 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4099 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4100 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4101 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4102 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004103
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004104- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004105 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004106 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4107 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4108 associate a docstring with a property.
4109
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004110- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4111 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4112 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4113 other built-in object types.
4114
4115- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4116 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4117 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4118 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4119 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4120
4121- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4122 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4123
4124- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4125 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004126 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004127 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4128 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4129 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4130 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4131 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4132
4133- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4134 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4135 class.
4136
4137- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4138 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4139 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4140 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4141
4142- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4143 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4144 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4145 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4146
4147- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4148 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4149
4150- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4151 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4152 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4153 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4154 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004155 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004156 with the same value as s.
4157
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004158- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4159
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004160Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004162
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004163- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4164
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004165- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4166 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4167 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4168 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4169 objects.
4170
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004171- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4172 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004173 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4174 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4175
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004176- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4177 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4178 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4179
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004180Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004182
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004183- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4184 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4185 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4186 by the instances.
4187
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004188- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4189 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4190 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4191
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004192- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4193 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4194 before the entire comparison is complete.
4195
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004196- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4197 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4198 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4199
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004200- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4201 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4202 getwriter().
4203
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004204- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4205 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4206
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004207- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004208 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4209 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4210
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004211- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4212 iterable object.
4213
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004214- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4215 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004216
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004217- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4218 authentication.
4219
4220- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4221 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004222
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004223- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004224 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4225 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4226 a sample driver.)
4227
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004228Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004230
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004231- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4232 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4233 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4234 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4235 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4236 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4237 kernel has large file support.
4238
4239- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4240 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4241 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4242 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4243 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4244
4245- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4246 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4247 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4248
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004249C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004251
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004252- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4253 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4254
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004255New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004256-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004257
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004258- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4259 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4260
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004261Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004263
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004264- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4265 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4266 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4267 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4268 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4269
4270- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4271 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4272 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4273 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4274
4275- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4276 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4277
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004278Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004280
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004281- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004282 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4283 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004284
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004285
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004286What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4287===========================
4288
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4290
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004291Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004293
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004294- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4295 big to represent as a C double.
4296
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004297- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4298 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4299 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4300 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4301 restriction).
4302
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004303- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4304 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4305 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4306 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4307 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4308
4309 >>> dir([])
4310 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4311 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4312 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4313 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4314 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4315 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4316 'reverse', 'sort']
4317
4318 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4319
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004320- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004321 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4322 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4323 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4324 OverflowError exception.
4325
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004326- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004327 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004328 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4329 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4330 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4331 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4332 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004333 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4335 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4336
4337 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4338 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4339 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4340 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004341
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004342- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004343 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4344 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4345 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4346 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4347 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4348 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4349 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4350 once it is created.
4351
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004352- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4353 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4354 (key, value) pairs.
4355
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004356- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004357 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4358 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4359
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004360- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4361 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4362 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4363 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4364 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004365
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004366- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004367 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4368 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4369
4370 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4371
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004372- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004373 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4374
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004375Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004377
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004378- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004379 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4380 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004381
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004382- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4383 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4384 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4385 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4386 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4387 in this area anymore).
4388
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004389- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4390 threading.Timer.
4391
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004392- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4393 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4394
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004395- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004396 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4397
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004398- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004399 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4400 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4401 converted to Python longs.
4402
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004403- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004404 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4405
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004406- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4407 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4408 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4409
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004410Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004412
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004413- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4414 division operators as per PEP 238.
4415
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004416Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004418
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004419- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4420 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4421 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4422 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4423
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004424C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004426
4427- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004428
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004429- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4430 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004431 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004432
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4434 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004435 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004437
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004438- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004439 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4440 module:
4441
4442 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004443
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004444 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4445 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004446
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004447 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4448 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004449
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004450 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4451
4452 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4453
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004454- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004455 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4456 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4457 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004458
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004459New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004461
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004462- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4463 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4464 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4465 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4466 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004467
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004468Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004470
4471Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004473
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004474- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4475 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4476 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4477 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004478 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4479 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4480 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4481 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4482 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004483
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004484- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004485 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4486
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004487
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004488What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4489===========================
4490
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4492
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004493Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004495
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004496- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4497 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4498
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004499- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4500 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4501 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004502
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004503- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4504 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4505 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4506 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004507
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004508- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4509
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004511
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004512Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004514
4515- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004516 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004517 the module docstring for details.
4518
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004519Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004521
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004522- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004523 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4524 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4525 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004526
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004527- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4528 Nick Mathewson.
4529
4530Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004532
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004533- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4534 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4535 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4536 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4537 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4538 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4539 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4540 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4541
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004542- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4543 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4544 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4545 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4546
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004547- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4548 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4549 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4550 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4551 come a long way).
4552
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004553- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4554 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4555 write filters for these warnings).
4556
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004557- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4558 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4559 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4560 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4561 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4562
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004563- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4564 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4565 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4566 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4567 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4568 older distribution.
4569
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004570Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004572
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004573- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4574 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004575 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004576
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004577- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4578 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4579 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4580
4581- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4582
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004583- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4584
4585- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4586
4587- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4588
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004589- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004590
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004591- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4592
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004593New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004595
4596C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004598
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004599- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4600 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4601 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4602 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4603 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4604 against buffer overruns.
4605
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004606- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004607 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4608 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004609 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4610 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4611 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4612
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004613- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4614 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4615 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4616 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4617 deprecated.
4618
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004619Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004621
4622- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4623 relevant is found.
4624
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004625
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004626What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004627===========================
4628
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4630
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004631Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004633
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004634- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4635 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4636 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4637 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4638 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4639 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4640 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4641 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004642 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004643 repaired.
4644
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004645- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004646 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004647 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4648 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4649 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4650 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4651 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4652 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4653 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4654 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4655
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004656- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4657 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4658 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4659 leading BMO character).
4660
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004661- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4662 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4663 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4664
4665 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4666 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4667 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004668
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004669 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4670 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4671 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4672 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4673 for various simple to use conversions.
4674
4675 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4676 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4677
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4679 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4680 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4681 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4682 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4683 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4684 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4685 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4686 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4687 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4688 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4689 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4690 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4691 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4692 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004693
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004694- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4695 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4696 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004697 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004698 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004699
4700 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004701 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4702 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4703 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4704 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4705 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004706 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4707 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004708
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004709 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4710 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4711 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004712 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004713
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004714- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4715 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4716 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4717 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4718 floating arithmetic,
4719
4720 x = 9007199254740992.0
4721 print long(x)
4722
4723 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4724 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4725 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4726 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4727 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4728 functions are of good quality).
4729
4730 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4731 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4732 algorithms to break.
4733
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004734- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4735 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4736 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4737 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4738 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4739 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4740 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4741 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4742 order.
4743
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004744- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4745 operation along the most common code paths.
4746
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004747- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4748 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4749
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004750- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4751 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4752 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4753 {}.update(UserDict())
4754
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004755- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4756 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4757 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4758 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4759 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4760 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4761 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4762 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4763
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004764- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004765 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004766
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004767 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004768 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4769 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004770 join() method of strings
4771 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004772 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4773 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004775 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004776
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004777- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4778 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4779
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004780- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4781 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4782
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004783- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4784 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4785 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4786 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4787
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004788- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4789 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004790 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004791 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4792 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004793
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004794- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4795
4796
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004797Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004799
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004800- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004801 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004802 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4803 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4804
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004805- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4806 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4807
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004808- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4809 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4810 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4811 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4812
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004813- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4814 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4815 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4816
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004817- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4818
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004819- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4820
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004821- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4822 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4823 that are still imported into string.py).
4824
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004825- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4826
4827- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4828 Now it does.
4829
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004830- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4831
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004832- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4833 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4834 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4835 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4836 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004837 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4838 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004839
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004840- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4841 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4842 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4843 'help(object)'.
4844
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004845Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004846-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004847
4848- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004849 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004850 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4851 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4852
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004853- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004854 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4855 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004856
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004857C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004859
4860- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4861 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004862
4863----
4864
4865**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**