blob: cdb9f8004b7e5b8cbc1d06b3d16e3ecade00c1bc [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000013- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
14
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000015- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
16 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
17
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000018- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000019 an ferror() call.
20
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000021- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
22 list.sort().
23
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000024- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
25 (2+3) --> (5).
26
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000027- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
28
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000029- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
30 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000031
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000032- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
33 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
34 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
35
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000036Extension Modules
37-----------------
38
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000039- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
40
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000041- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
42 {remove_history,replace_history}
43
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000044- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
45 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000046
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000047- stat_float_times is now True.
48
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000049- array.array objects are now picklable.
50
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000051- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
52 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
53
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000054- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
55 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
56 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
57
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000058- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
59 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000060
61Library
62-------
63
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +000064- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
65 in LWPCookieJar.
66
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +000067- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
68
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +000069- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
70
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +000071- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
72
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +000073- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
74
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +000075- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
76
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +000077- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
78
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +000079- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
80
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +000081- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
82
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +000083- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
84 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
85 be exploited in various ways.
86
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +000087- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
88
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000089- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
90
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000091- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
92
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000093- Enhancements to the csv module:
94
95 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
96 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
97 PEP 305.
98 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
99 reporting.
100 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
101 dictates.
102 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000103 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000104 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000105 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
106 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000107 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
108 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000109 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000110 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
111 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
112 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
113 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
114 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
115 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
116 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
117 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
118 without first creating a dialect class.
119 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
120 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
121 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000122 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000123 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
124 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000125 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
126 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
127 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
128 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000129 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
130 This has been fixed.
131
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000132- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
133 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
134 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
135 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
136
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000137- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
138
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000139- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
140 (Bug #951915).
141
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000142- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
143 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
144 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
145 encoding alias table
146
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000147- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
148
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000149- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
150 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
151
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000152- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
153
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000154- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
155
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000156- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
157
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000158- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
159
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000160- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
161
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000162- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
163 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
164 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
165
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000166- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000167 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000168
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000169- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
170 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
171 tokenizer with very long source lines.
172
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000173- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
174 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
175
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000176- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
177 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000178
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000179- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
180 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
181
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000182Build
183-----
184
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000185- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
186 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
187
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000188- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
189 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
190 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
191 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
192 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
193 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
194 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
195 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
196
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000197- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
198 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
199 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
200 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
201
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000202
203C API
204-----
205
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000206- Removed PyRange_New().
207
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000208
209Tests
210-----
211
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000212- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000213
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000214
215Documentation
216-------------
217
218- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
219 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
220 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
221
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000222Mac
223---
224
225
226
227Tools/Demos
228-----------
229
230
231
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000232What's New in Python 2.4 final?
233===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000234
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000235*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000236
237Core and builtins
238-----------------
239
240- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
241 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
242 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
243
244
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000245What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
246==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000247
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000248*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000249
250Core and builtins
251-----------------
252
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000253- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
254 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
255 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
256
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000257
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000258Library
259-------
260
261- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
262 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
263 raised is re-raised.
264
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000265- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
266 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
267
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000268- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
269 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
270 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
271 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
272 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
273 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
274 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
275 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
276 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
277 by the slice are recomputed now.
278
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000279- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000280
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000281Build
282-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000283
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000284- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
285 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
286 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000287
288C API
289-----
290
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000291- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
292
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000293
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000294What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
295================================
296
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000297*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000298
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000299License
300-------
301
302The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
303is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
304changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
305Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
306intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
307durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
308the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
309License::
310
311 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
312
313says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
314to Python 2.1.1.
315
316The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
317License Version 2.
318
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000319Core and builtins
320-----------------
321
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000322- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
323 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
324 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
325 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
326 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
327 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
328 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
329 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
330 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
331 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
332
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000333- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000334
335Extension Modules
336-----------------
337
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000338- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
339 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
340 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
341 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000342
343Library
344-------
345
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000346- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
347 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
348 returned.
349
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000350- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
351
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000352- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
353 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
354
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000355- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
356
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000357- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
358 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000359
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000360- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
361
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000362- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
363
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000364- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000365 the source code is updated and reloaded.
366
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000367Build
368-----
369
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000370- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000371
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000372What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
373================================
374
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000375*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000376
377Core and builtins
378-----------------
379
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000380- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000381 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
382
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000383- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
384 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
385 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
386 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
387
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000388- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
389 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
390
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000391- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
392 constant.
393
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000394- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
395 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
396 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
397 large), and to anomalies such as
398 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
399 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
400 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
401 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000402
403Extension modules
404-----------------
405
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000406- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
407 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000408 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
409 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
410 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000411
412Library
413-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000414
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000415- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000416 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000417 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
418 --swig-cpp.
419
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000420- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
421 it is set.
422
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000423- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000424
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000425- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
426 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
427 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
428 Closes bug #1039270.
429
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000430- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000431
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000432 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000433 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
434 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
435 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
436 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
437 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
438 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
439 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
440 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
441 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
442 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
443 + Updates to documentation.
444
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000445- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
446 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
447 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
448 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
449
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000450- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000451
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000452- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
453 applications should use the getmember function.
454
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000455- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
456
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000457- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
458 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
459 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
460 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
461 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
462 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
463 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
464 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
465 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
466
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000467- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
468 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000469 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000470
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000471- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
472 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
473 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
474 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
475 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
476 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
477 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
478 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000479
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000480- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
481 the new public features (of which there are many).
482
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000483- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000484 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
485 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
486 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
487 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000488 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000489
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000490- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
491
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000492- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
493 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
494 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
495 options.
496
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000497- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
498 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
499 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
500 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
501 conditions under which non-string values work.
502
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000503Build
504-----
505
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000506- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
507 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
508 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
509
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000510- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
511 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
512 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
513 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
514 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000515
516C API
517-----
518
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000519- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
520 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
521
522- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
523
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000524- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
525 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
526 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
527 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
528 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
529 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
530 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
531 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
532 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
533
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000534- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
535
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000536- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
537 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
538 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000539
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000540Tests
541-----
542
543- test__locale ported to unittest
544
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000545Mac
546---
547
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000548- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
549 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
550 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000551
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000552Tools/Demos
553-----------
554
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000555- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
556 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
557 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
558 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
559 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000560
561
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000562What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
563=================================
564
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000565*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000566
567Core and builtins
568-----------------
569
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000570- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000571 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
572
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000573- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
574 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
575 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
576 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
577 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
578 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
579 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
580 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000581 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
582 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
583 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
584 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
585 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000586
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000587- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
588 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
589 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
590 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
591 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
592
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000593- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
594
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000595- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
596 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
597
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000598- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
599 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
600 modified the list.
601
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000602- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
603 functions is now writable.
604
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000605- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
606 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
607 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
608 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
609
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000610- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
611 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
612 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
613 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
614 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000615
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000616- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
617 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
618
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000619Extension modules
620-----------------
621
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000622- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
623
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000624- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
625 data.
626
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000627- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
628 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
629 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
630 supposed to have been truncated away.
631
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000632- Added socket.socketpair().
633
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000634- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
635 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
636
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000637- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000638 versions of Python, have now been removed.
639
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000640Library
641-------
642
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000643- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000644 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000645
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000646- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
647 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
648
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000649- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
650 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
651
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000652- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
653
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000654- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
655 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000656
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000657- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
658 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
659
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000660- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
661
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000662- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
663
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000664- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
665
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000666- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
667 Percivall.
668
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000669- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
670 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
671
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000672- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
673 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
674 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000675 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000676
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000677- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
678 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
679 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
680 and exponent.
681
682- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
683
684- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
685 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
686 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
687
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000688- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
689 to the readline module.
690
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000691- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000692 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
693 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000694
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000695- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
696 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
697 contains symlinks.
698
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000699- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
700 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
701
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000702- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
703 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
704 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
705
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000706- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
707 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
708 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
709 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
710 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
711 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
712 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
713 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
714 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
715 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
716 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
717 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
718 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
719
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000720- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
721
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000722Tools/Demos
723-----------
724
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000725- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
726 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
727
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000728- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
729
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000730Build
731-----
732
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000733- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
734 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
735 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
736 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
737 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
738 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
739 plans to do so.
740
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000741- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
742 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
743
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000744- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
745 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
746
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000747- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
748 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
749
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000750- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
751 GNU/k*BSD systems.
752
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000753- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
754 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
755
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000756C API
757-----
758
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000759..
760
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000761Documentation
762-------------
763
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000764- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
765 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
766
767- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
768 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
769 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000770
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000771New platforms
772-------------
773
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000774- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
775
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000776Tests
777-----
778
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000779..
780
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000781Windows
782-------
783
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000784- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
785 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
786 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
787 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
788 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
789 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
790 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
791 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
792 the problem.
793
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000794Mac
795---
796
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000797..
798
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000799
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000800What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
801=================================
802
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000803*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000804
805Core and builtins
806-----------------
807
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000808- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
809 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
810 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
811 sensitive code.
812
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000813- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000814 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000815
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000816 @staticmethod
817 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000818
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000819 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000820
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000821- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
822 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
823 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
824 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
825 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
826 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
827 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
828 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
829 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
830 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
831 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
832
833 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
834 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
835 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
836 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
837 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
838 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
839 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
840
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000841- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
842 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
843
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000844- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000845 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000846
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000847- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000848 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000849 which was missing for no apparent reason.
850
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000851- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000852 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
853 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
854
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000855- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
856 types that support garbage collection.
857
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000858- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
859
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000860- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
861 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
862 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
863 Jython.
864
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000865- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
866
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000867- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
868 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
869
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000870- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
871 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
872 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000873
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000874- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
875 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
876 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
877
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000878Extension modules
879-----------------
880
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000881- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
882
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000883Library
884-------
885
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000886- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
887 TIS-620
888
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000889- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
890 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
891 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
892 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
893 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
894 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
895 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
896 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
897 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
898 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
899
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000900- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
901
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000902- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
903 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
904 same as when the argument is omitted).
905 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
906
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000907- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
908
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000909- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
910 schemes are offered.
911
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000912- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
913
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000914- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
915 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
916 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
917
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000918- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
919
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000920- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
921 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
922
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000923- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
924 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
925 when dummy_threading is being used.
926
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000927- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
928 from a tarfile.
929
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000930- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000931 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000932
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000933- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
934 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
935 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
936 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
937
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000938- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
939 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
940
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000941- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
942 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
943 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
944 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
945 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
946 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
947 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
948 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
949 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
950 by some other method in progress).
951
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000952- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
953 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
954 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000955
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000956- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
957
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000958- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
959 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
960 AM Kuchling.
961
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000962- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
963 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
964 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
965
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000966- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
967 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
968 instead of unsigned.
969
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000970- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000971 no longer part of the public API.
972
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000973- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
974 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
975 string methods of the same name).
976
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000977- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000978 SF patch 945642.
979
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000980- doctest unittest integration improvements:
981
982 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
983
984 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
985 DocTestSuites.
986
987- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
988 that provide thread-local data.
989
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000990- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
991 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
992
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000993- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
994
995- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
996 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
997 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
998
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000999- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1000
1001 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1002 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1003 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001004
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001005 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1006 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1007 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1008 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1009
1010 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1011 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1012
1013 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1014 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1015 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1016 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1017
1018 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1019 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1020 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1021 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1022 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1023
1024 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1025 wrapping help output.
1026
1027 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1028 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1029 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001030
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001031C API
1032-----
1033
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001034- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1035 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1036 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1037 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1038 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1039 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1040 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1041 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1042 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1043 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1044 its visible semantics have not changed.
1045
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001046- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1047 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1048
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001049Documentation
1050-------------
1051
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001052- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001053
1054 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001055 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001056
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001057 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001058
1059 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1060
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001061- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001062
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001063Tests
1064-----
1065
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001066- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001067 platforms that use the Makefile.
1068
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001069- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1070 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1071 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1072
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001073
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001074What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1075=================================
1076
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001077*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001078
1079Core and builtins
1080-----------------
1081
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001082- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1083 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1084 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1085 objects now (one object instead of three).
1086
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001087- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1088 Windows DLLs.
1089
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001090- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1091 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001092
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001093- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1094 a new .pyc magic.
1095
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001096- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1097 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1098 be there.
1099
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001100- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1101 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1102 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1103
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001104- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1105 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1106 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1107
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001108- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1109
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001110- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1111 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1112 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001113
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001114- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1115 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1116
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001117- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1118
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001119- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001120 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001121
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001122- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1123
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001124- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1125
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001126- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1127 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1128
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001129- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1130 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1131 Fixes bug #858016 .
1132
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001133- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1134 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1135 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1136
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001137- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1138 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1139 improves their performance (about 35%).
1140
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001141- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1142 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1143 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1144
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001145- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1146 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1147 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1148 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1149
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001150- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1151 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1152 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1153 length is not known).
1154
1155- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1156 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001157 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1158 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001159 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1160
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001161- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1162 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1163
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001164- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1165 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1166 keyword arguments.
1167
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001168- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1169 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1170 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1171
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001172- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1173 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1174 cases.
1175
1176- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1177 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1178 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1179 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1180 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1181 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1182 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1183 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1184 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1185 a release build.
1186
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001187- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1188 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1189
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001190- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001191 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001192
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001193- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1194 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1195 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1196 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1197 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1198 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1199 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1200 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1201 destroyed.
1202
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001203- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1204 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1205 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1206 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1207 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1208 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1209 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1210 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1211
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001212- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1213 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1214 character other than a space.
1215
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001216- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1217 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1218 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1219 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1220 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1221 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1222 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1223 attributes with the same name.
1224
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001225- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1226 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1227 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1228 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1229 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1230 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1231 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1232 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1233 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1234 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1235 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1236 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1237 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1238 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001239
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001240- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1241 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1242 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1243 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1244 This has been repaired.
1245
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001246- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1247
1248- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1249
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001250- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1251 over a sequence.
1252
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001253- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001254 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001255
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001256- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1257
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001258- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1259 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1260 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1261 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1262 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1263 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1264 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1265 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1266
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001267- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1268 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1269 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1270
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001271- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1272 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1273 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1274 freelist.
1275
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001276- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1277 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1278
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001279- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1280 number.
1281
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001282- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1283 a TypeError exception.
1284
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001285- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1286 820195.
1287
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001288- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1289 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1290 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1291
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001292- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001293 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1294 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001295
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001296- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1297 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1298 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1299
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001300- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1301 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001302 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001303
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001304- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001305 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1306 the first call.
1307
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001308
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001309Extension modules
1310-----------------
1311
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001312- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1313 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1314
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001315- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1316 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1317 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1318 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1319 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1320 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1321 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001322
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001323- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1324
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001325- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1326
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001327- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1328 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1329
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001330- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1331 fewer false positives.
1332
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001333- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1334 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1335
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001336- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001337 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1338
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001339- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001340 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001341 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001342 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1343 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001344
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001345- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1346 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1347 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1348 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1349
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001350- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1351 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1352 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1353 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1354 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1355 #897625.
1356
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001357- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1358 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1359
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001360- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1361 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1362 and pops on either side of the deque.
1363
1364- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1365 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1366
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001367- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1368 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1369 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1370 other functions that expect a function argument.
1371
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001372- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1373
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001374- os.getsid was added.
1375
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001376- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1377 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1378 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1379
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001380- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1381
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001382- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1383
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001384- readline.clear_history was added.
1385
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001386- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1387
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001388- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1389
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001390- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1391
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001392- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1393
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001394- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1395
1396- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1397
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001398- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1399
1400- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1401
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001402- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1403 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1404 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1405
1406- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1407 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1408 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1409 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1410 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1411 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1412 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1413
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001414- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1415 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1416 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1417 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001418
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001419- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001420 iterators from a single iterable.
1421
1422- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1423 of raising a TypeError exception.
1424
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001425- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1426 as parameter.
1427
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001428Library
1429-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001430
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001431- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1432 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1433 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001434
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001435- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1436 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1437 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001438
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001439- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001440
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001441- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1442 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001443
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001444- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1445 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1446
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001447- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1448
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001449- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001450 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001451
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001452- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001453 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001454
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001455- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1456
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001457- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1458 on cygwin and mingw32.
1459
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001460- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1461
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001462- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1463 module.
1464
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001465- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1466 installation scheme for all platforms.
1467
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001468- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001469 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001470
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001471- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1472 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1473 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1474
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001475- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1476 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1477 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1478
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001479- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1480
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001481- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1482
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001483- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1484 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1485
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001486- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1487 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1488 type pattern with the same value exists.
1489
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001490- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1491 when run from the command prompt).
1492
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001493- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1494 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1495
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001496- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1497 default sort).
1498
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001499- Added global runctx function to profile module
1500
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001501- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1502
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001503- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1504
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001505- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1506
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001507- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001508 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1509 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1510 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1511 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1512 accordingly.
1513
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001514- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1515 decoding standards.
1516
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001517- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1518 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1519 called for all requests.
1520
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001521- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1522 they are passed to the compiler.
1523
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001524- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1525 indent, width and depth.
1526
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001527- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1528 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1529
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001530- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1531 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1532
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001533- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1534
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001535- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1536
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001537- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1538
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001539- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1540 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1541
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001542- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001543 for better performance.
1544
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001545- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001546
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001547- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1548 a string).
1549
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001550- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1551
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001552- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1553
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001554- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1555
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001556- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1557
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001558- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1559 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1560 list of fieldnames.
1561
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001562- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1563 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1564
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001565- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1566
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001567- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1568 empty lists.
1569
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001570- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1571 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1572 and shelves.
1573
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001574- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1575 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1576
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001577- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001578 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1579 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001580
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001581- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1582 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001583 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001584
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001585- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001586 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1587 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1588
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001589- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1590 and removed in Py2.4.
1591
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001592- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1593
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001594- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1595
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001596Tools/Demos
1597-----------
1598
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001599- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1600 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1601
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001602- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1603
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001604- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1605 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1606 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1607 destination in situations where both files are given.
1608
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001609- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1610 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1611 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1612 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1613
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001614- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1615
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001616- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1617 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1618 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1619 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1620 now.
1621
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001622- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1623 in effect
1624
1625- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1626 C-c C-h
1627
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001628- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1629 -d option was given.
1630
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001631Build
1632-----
1633
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001634- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1635 build under OS X.
1636
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001637- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1638 --enable-profiling.
1639
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001640- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1641 is configured --with-tsc.
1642
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001643- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1644 on AMD64.
1645
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001646- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1647 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1648
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001649- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1650 removed.
1651
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001652- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1653 supported (see PEP 11).
1654
1655- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1656
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001657- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1658
1659- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1660 (see PEP 11).
1661
1662- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1663 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1664
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001665C API
1666-----
1667
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001668- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1669 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1670 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1671
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001672- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1673 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1674 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1675 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1676
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001677- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1678 generator objects.
1679
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001680- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1681 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001682 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1683 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001684
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001685- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1686 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1687
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001688- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1689 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1690 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1691 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1692 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1693
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001694- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1695 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1696 about 10% faster.
1697
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001698- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1699 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1700
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001701- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1702 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1703 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1704 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1705
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001706Windows
1707-------
1708
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001709- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1710 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1711 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1712 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1713
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001714- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1715 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1716 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1717
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001718
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001719What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1720===============================
1721
1722*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1723
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001724IDLE
1725----
1726
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001727- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1728 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1729 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1730 context-menu actions.
1731
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001732- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1733 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1734 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1735 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1736 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1737 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1738 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1739 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1740 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1741
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001742
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001743What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1744=============================================
1745
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001746*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001747
1748Core and builtins
1749-----------------
1750
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001751- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001752 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001753 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1754
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001755Extension modules
1756-----------------
1757
1758- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1759 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1760 than once. This has been fixed.
1761
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001762- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1763 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1764 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1765 call.
1766
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001767- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1768
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001769Library
1770-------
1771
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001772- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1773 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1774
1775- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1776 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1777 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1778 restored.
1779
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001780IDLE
1781----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001782
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001783- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001784
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001785Build
1786-----
1787
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001788- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1789 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1790
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001791C API
1792-----
1793
1794Windows
1795-------
1796
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001797- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1798 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1799
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001800- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1801
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001802Mac
1803---
1804
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001805- Various fixes to pimp.
1806
1807- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1808
1809- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1810 more problems than it solves.
1811
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001812
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001813What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1814=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001815
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001816*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1817
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001818Core and builtins
1819-----------------
1820
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001821- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1822 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1823
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001824- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1825 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001826 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001827
1828- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1829 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1830 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001831 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001832
1833- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1834 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001835
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001836- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1837 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1838 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1839
1840- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001841 770247.
1842
1843- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001844
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001845Extension modules
1846-----------------
1847
1848- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1849 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1850
1851- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1852
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001853- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1854
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001855- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1856 contained within the _strptime module.
1857
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001858- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1859 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1860
1861- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001862 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1863
1864- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1865 the find_class attribute, if present.
1866
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001867- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001868
1869 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1870 (SF bug 763298).
1871
1872 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001873 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1874 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1875 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001876
1877 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1878
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001879Library
1880-------
1881
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001882- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1883
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001884- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1885 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1886 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1887 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1888 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1889 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1890 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1891 or Tester().
1892
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001893- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1894 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1895 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1896 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1897 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1898 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1899 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1900 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1901 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001902
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001903 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001904
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001905- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1906 weren't before was an oversight.
1907
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001908- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1909 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1910
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001911- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1912 when there are no lines.
1913
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001914- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1915 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1916
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001917- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1918 to child processes.
1919
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001920- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1921
1922- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1923
1924- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1925 xmlrpclib.
1926
1927- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1928 responses.
1929
1930- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1931 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1932
1933- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1934 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1935 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1936
1937- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1938 used as patterns.
1939
1940- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1941 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1942 than Tk 8.3.
1943
1944- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1945
1946- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001947
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001948Tools/Demos
1949-----------
1950
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001951- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1952
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001953- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1954
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001955- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001956
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001957Build
1958-----
1959
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001960- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1961
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001962- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1963
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001964- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1965 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001966
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001967- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1968 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1969 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001970
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001971C API
1972-----
1973
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001974- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1975 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1976
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001977Windows
1978-------
1979
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001980- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1981 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1982 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1983 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1984 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1985 Python exception ::
1986
1987 thread.error: can't start new thread
1988
1989 is raised now.
1990
1991- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1992 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1993 instead of from DLL teardown.
1994
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001995Mac
1996---
1997
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001998- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001999 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002000 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2001 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2002 the executable in the bundle.
2003
2004- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002005
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002006- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2007
2008- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2009 on Panther.
2010
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002011What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2012================================
2013
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002014*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002015
2016Core and builtins
2017-----------------
2018
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002019- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2020 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2021 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2022 with the -i option.
2023
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002024- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2025 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2026
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002027- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2028 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2029
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002030- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2031 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2032 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2033 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2034 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2035 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2036 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2037 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2038 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2039 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2040 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2041 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2042 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002043
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002044- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2045 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2046 embedded in a lambda expression.
2047
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002048- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2049 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2050 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2051 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2052 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2053
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002054- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2055 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2056 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2057
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002058- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2059 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2060
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002061- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2062 It's writable again.
2063
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002064- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2065 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2066 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002067 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002068
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002069- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2070 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2071 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2072
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002073Extension modules
2074-----------------
2075
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002076- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2077 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2078
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002079- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2080 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2081 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2082 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2083
2084- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2085 collection.
2086
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002087- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2088 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2089 unique within a single program run.
2090
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002091- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2092 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2093
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002094- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2095 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2096
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002097- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2098 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002099
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002100- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2101
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002102- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2103 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2104
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002105- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2106 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2107 for many BSD-derived systems.
2108
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002109
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002110Library
2111-------
2112
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002113- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2114 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2115 primary ones:
2116
2117 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2118 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2119 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2120
2121 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2122 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2123 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2124 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2125 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2126 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2127
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002128- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2129 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2130 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2131 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2132 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2133 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2134 argument.
2135
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002136- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2137 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2138 in the archive.
2139
2140- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2141 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2142
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002143- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2144 569574).
2145
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002146- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2147 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2148 no more.
2149
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002150- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2151 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2152 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2153 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2154 code coverage.
2155
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002156- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2157 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2158 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002159 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2160 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002161
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002162- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2163 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2164 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002165 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002166
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002167- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2168
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002169- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2170 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2171 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2172 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2173
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002174- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2175 handling.
2176
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002177- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2178 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2179
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002180- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2181 in socket.py.
2182
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002183- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2184
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002185- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2186 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2187 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2188 opener with proxy support.
2189
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002190- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2191
2192- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2193
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002194Tools/Demos
2195-----------
2196
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002197- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2198
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002199- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2200
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002201- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2202 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002203
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002204- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2205 files.
2206
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002207Build
2208-----
2209
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002210- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002211 different root directory.
2212
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002213C API
2214-----
2215
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002216- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2217 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2218 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2219 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2220 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2221 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2222 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2223 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2224 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2225 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2226
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002227- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2228 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2229 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2230 from Python.
2231
2232
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002233New platforms
2234-------------
2235
2236None this time.
2237
2238Tests
2239-----
2240
2241- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2242 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2243
2244Windows
2245-------
2246
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002247- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2248
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002249- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2250 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2251 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2252 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2253 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2254 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2255 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2256 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2257 that's what it's for.
2258
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002259Mac
2260---
2261
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002262- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2263 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2264 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2265 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002266- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2267 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2268- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002269
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002270SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2271------------------------------------
2272
2273430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2274598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2275622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2276661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2277683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2278697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2279713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2280724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2281727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2282729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2283730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2284731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2285732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2286733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2287735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2288740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2289744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2290745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2291747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2292749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2293751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2294753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2295755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2296757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2297760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2298
2299
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002300What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2301================================
2302
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002303*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002304
2305Core and builtins
2306-----------------
2307
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002308- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2309 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2310
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002311- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2312 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2313 and cannot be strings).
2314
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002315- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2316 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2317 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2318 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2319
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002320- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2321 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2322 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2323 Python itself.
2324
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002325- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2326 the referenced object, if it has one.
2327
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002328- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2329 the thread started at
2330 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2331
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002332- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2333 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2334 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2335 placed on a list index.
2336
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002337- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2338 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2339 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2340 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2341
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002342- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2343 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2344 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2345 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2346 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2347 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2348 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2349
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002350- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2351 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2352 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2353 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2354 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2355
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002356- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2357 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002358
2359- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2360 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2361 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2362 #693195.)
2363
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002364- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2365 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002366
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002367- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002368 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002369 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2370 interpreter executions, would fail.
2371
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002372- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002373 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002374 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002375
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002376Extension modules
2377-----------------
2378
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002379- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2380 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2381 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2382 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2383
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002384- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2385 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2386
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002387- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2388 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2389 and Greg Chapman.)
2390
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002391- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2392 recursively.
2393
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002394- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002395 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2396 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2397 leaks.
2398
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002399- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2400
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002401- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2402 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2403 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2404 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2405 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2406 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2407 #705836.
2408
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002409- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002410 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2411
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002412- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2413 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2414 See SF bug #692416.
2415
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002416- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2417 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2418
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002419- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2420 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2421 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002422
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002423- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002424 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2425 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2426
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002427- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2428 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2429 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2430 timeouts to work properly.
2431
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002432Library
2433-------
2434
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002435- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2436 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2437 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2438 future release.
2439
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002440- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2441 for querying platform dependent features.
2442
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002443- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002444
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002445- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2446 pickle protocol versions.
2447
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002448- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2449 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2450 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2451
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002452- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2453
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002454- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2455 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2456 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2457 modules.
2458
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002459- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2460 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2461 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2462
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002463- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2464 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2465
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002466- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2467 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2468 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2469
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002470- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002471 MS Office extensions.
2472
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002473- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2474 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2475
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002476- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2477 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2478
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002479- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2480 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2481 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2482 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2483 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2484 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2485
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002486- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2487 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2488 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002489
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002490- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2491 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2492 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2493
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002494- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2495
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002496- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2497 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2498 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2499
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002500Tools/Demos
2501-----------
2502
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002503- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2504 See the module docstring for details.
2505
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002506Build
2507-----
2508
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002509- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2510 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002511
2512C API
2513-----
2514
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002515- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2516
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002517- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2518 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2519 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2520
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002521- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2522 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002523
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002524 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2525 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2526 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002527
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002528- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002529 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2530
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002531- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2532 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2533 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002534
2535New platforms
2536-------------
2537
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002538None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002539
2540Tests
2541-----
2542
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002543- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2544 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002545
2546Windows
2547-------
2548
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002549- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2550 function.
2551
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002552- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2553 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002554
2555Mac
2556---
2557
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002558- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2559 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002560
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002561- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2562 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002563
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002564- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2565 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2566 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002567
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002568- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002569 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2570 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002571
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002572- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2573 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002574
2575
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002576What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2577=================================
2578
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002579*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002580
2581Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002582-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002583
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002584- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2585 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2586 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2587
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002588- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2589 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2590 (SF patch #664376.)
2591
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002592- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2593 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2594 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2595 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2596 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2597 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002598 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002599
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002600- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2601 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2602 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2603 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002604 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002605
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002606- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2607 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2608 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2609 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2610 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2611 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2612 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2613 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2614 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2615 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2616 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2617
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002618- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2619 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2620 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2621 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2622 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2623 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2624
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002625- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2626 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2627
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002628- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2629 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2630 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2631 case.)
2632
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002633- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2634 passed as unicode strings.
2635
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002636- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2637 See SF bug #683467.
2638
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002639- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2640 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2641
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002642- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2643
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002644- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2645
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002646- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2647 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2648 arguments.
2649
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002650- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2651 See SF bug #667147.
2652
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002653- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002654 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002655 See SF bug #676155.
2656
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002657- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002658 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002659 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2660 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2661 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2662 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2663 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2664 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002665
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002666Extension modules
2667-----------------
2668
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002669- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2670 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2671 tp_as_number pointer.
2672
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002673- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2674 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2675 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2676 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2677 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2678
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002679- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2680
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002681- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2682
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002683- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002684 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002685 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2686 patch #678531.)
2687
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002688- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2689 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2690
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002691- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2692 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2693
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002694- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2695
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002696- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2697 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2698 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2699
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002700- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2701
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002702- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2703 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2704
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002705- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002706
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002707- datetime changes:
2708
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002709 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2710
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002711 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2712 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2713 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2714 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2715 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2716 now.
2717
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002718 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002719 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2720 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002721
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002722 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002723 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002724 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2725 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2726 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2727 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002728
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002729 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2730 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2731 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002732 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2733
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002734 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2735 by a later example coded by Guido.
2736
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002737 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002738 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2739 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2740 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002741 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2742 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2743
2744 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2745 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2746 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2747 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2748 tzinfo subclass instance.
2749
2750 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2751 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2752 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2753 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2754 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2755 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2756 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2757 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002758
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002759 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2760 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2761 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2762 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2763 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002764 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2765
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002766 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002767
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002768 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2769 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2770 as a naive datetime object.
2771
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002772 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2773 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2774 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2775
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002776 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2777 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2778 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2779 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2780 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2781 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2782 comparison.
2783
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002784 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2785 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2786 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2787 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002788 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002789
2790 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002791
2792 and ::
2793
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002794 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2795
2796 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2797 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2798 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2799 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2800
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002801 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2802 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2803 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2804 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2805 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2806
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002807 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2808 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002809 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2810 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002811
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002812Library
2813-------
2814
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002815- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2816 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2817
2818- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2819 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2820 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2821 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2822 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2823 See PEP 307 for details.
2824
2825- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2826 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2827
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002828- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2829 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002830 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002831 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2832 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002833 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002834
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002835- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2836 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2837
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002838- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2839 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2840 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2841
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002842- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2843
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002844- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2845 exception.
2846
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002847- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2848 class.
2849
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002850- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2851 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2852 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2853
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002854- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2855 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2856
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002857- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002858 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2859 See SF bug #659228.
2860
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002861- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2862 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2863 See SF patch #651082.
2864
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002865- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002866
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002867- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2868 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2869
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002870- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002871 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002872
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002873- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2874 DOS paths from other platforms.
2875
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002876Tools/Demos
2877-----------
2878
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002879- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2880 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2881 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2882 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2883 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2884 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2885 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2886 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2887 example:
2888
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002889 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2890 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002891
2892 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2893
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002894
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002895Build
2896-----
2897
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002898- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2899 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2900 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002901 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2902
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002903 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2904
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002905- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2906 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2907 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2908 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2909 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2910 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2911 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2912 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2913 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2914
2915- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2916 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2917 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2918 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2919
2920- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2921 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2922
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002923C API
2924-----
2925
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002926- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2927 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002928
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002929- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2930 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2931 tp_as_number pointer.
2932
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002933- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2934 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2935 (SF #681367)
2936
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002937- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2938 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2939 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2940 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002941
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002942Tests
2943-----
2944
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002945- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002946 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2947 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2948 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2949 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2950 pydoc.)
2951
2952- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2953
2954- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002955
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002956Windows
2957-------
2958
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002959- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2960 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2961 time).
2962
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002963- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2964 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2965
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002966- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2967 release without strong cryptography.
2968
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002969- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002970 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002971
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002972- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2973 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2974
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002975Mac
2976---
2977
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002978- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2979 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002980
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002981- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2982 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2983 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002984
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002985- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2986 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002987
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002988- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2989 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2990 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2991 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002992
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002993- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002994 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2995 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2996 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002997
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002998
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002999What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003000=================================
3001
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003002*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003003
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003004Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003005--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003006
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003007- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3008
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003009- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3010 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003011 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003012 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003013 a different meaning than before.
3014
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003015- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003016 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003017 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003018
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003019- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003020 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003021 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003022
3023- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3024 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3025 and deallocation.
3026
3027- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3028 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3029
3030- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3031 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3032 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3033 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3034 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3035
3036- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3037 now detected by the garbage collector.
3038
3039- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3040 [SF bug 519621]
3041
3042- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3043 identifier.
3044
3045- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3046 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3047 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3048 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3049 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3050 [SF bug 563060]
3051
3052- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3053 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3054 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3055 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3056 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3057
3058- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3059 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3060 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3061
3062- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3063
3064- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3065 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3066 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3067 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3068 state of the slots would be lost.)
3069
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003070Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003071-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003072
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003073- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003074 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3075 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3076 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3077 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003078 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3079 Jython 2.1.
3080
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003081- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003082 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003083 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3084 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3085 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3086 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3087 these, see PEP 302.
3088
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003089- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3090 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3091 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3092
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003093- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3094 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3095 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3096
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003097- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3098 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3099 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3100
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003101- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3102 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3103 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3104 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3105 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3106 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3107 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3108 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3109 releases or implementations.
3110
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003111- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003112 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3113 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003114
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003115- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3116 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3117
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003118- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3119 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3120 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3121
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003122- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3123 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3124
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003125- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3126 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003127 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3128 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003129
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003130- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3131 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3132 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3133 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3134 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3135
3136 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3137 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3138 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3139 pattern.
3140
3141 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3142 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3143 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3144 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3145
3146 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3147 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3148 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3149 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3150 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3151 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3152
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003153- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3154 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3155 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3156 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3157 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3158 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3159 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3160 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003161
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003162- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3163 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3164 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3165 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3166 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003167 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3168 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3169 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3170 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3171 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3172 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3173 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003174
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003175- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3176 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3177
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003178- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3179 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3180 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3181 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3182 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3183 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3184 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3185 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3186 to Zack Weinberg!
3187
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003188- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3189 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3190 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3191 type. This has been fixed now.
3192
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003193- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3194 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3195 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3196
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003197- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3198 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3199 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3200 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3201 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3202 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3203 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3204 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003205 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003206
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003207- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3208 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3209 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003210
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003211- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3212 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3213 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3214 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3215 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3216 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3217 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3218 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003219 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003220 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3221 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3222
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003223- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3224 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3225 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3226 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3227 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3228 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3229 this.)
3230
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003231- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3232 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003233 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003234 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003235 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3236 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003237 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3238 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003239
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003240- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3241 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3242 currently running.
3243
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003244- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3245 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3246 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3247 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3248
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003249- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3250 as directory names.
3251
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003252- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3253 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3254
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003255- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3256 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3257
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003258- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003259 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3260 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003261
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003262- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3263 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3264 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3265 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3266 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3267
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003268- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3269 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3270 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3271 removed.
3272
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003273- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3274 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3275 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3276
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003277- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3278 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3279 to __debug__.
3280
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003281- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3282 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3283 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3284
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003285- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3286 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3287 deprecated now.
3288
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003289- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3290 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3291 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003292
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003293- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3294 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3295 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3296 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3297 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003298
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003299- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3300 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3301
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003302- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3303 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3304 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003305 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003306 is backward compatible.
3307
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003308- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3309 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3310 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3311 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3312 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3313
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003314- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3315 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3316 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3317 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3318 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3319 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003320
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003321- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3322 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3323
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003324- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3325 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3326
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003327- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3328 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3329 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3330 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3331 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3332
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003333- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3334 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3335 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3336
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003337- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003338 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3339
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003340- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3341 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3342 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003343
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003344- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3345 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3346
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003347- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3348 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3349 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3350
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003351- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3352
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003353Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003355
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003356- Added three operators to the operator module:
3357 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3358 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3359 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3360
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003361- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3362
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003363- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3364 archives.
3365
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003366- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3367 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3368 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3369
3370 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3371
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003372- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3373 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3374 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003375 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003376
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003377- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3378 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3379 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3380 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003381 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3382 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3383 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3384 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003385
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003386- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3387 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003388
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003389- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3390
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003391- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3392 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3393
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003394- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3395 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3396 supported.
3397
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003398- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3399
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003400- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3401 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003402
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003403- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3404 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3405
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003406- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3407
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003408- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3409 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3410
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003411- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3412 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3413 functions but callable type objects.
3414
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003415- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003416 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003417 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003418
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003419- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3420 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003421
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003422- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3423 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003424
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003425- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3426 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3427 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3428 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3429
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003430- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3431 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003432
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003433- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3434 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3435 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3436 and __imul__.
3437
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003438- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003439 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3440 is called.
3441
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003442- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3443 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3444 interpreter was compiled.
3445
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003446- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3447 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3448 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003449 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003450 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3451 1, not 2.
3452
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003453- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3454 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3455 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3456 limit.
3457
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003458- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3459 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3460 bug #623464.
3461
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003462- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3463 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3464 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3465 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3466
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003467Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003468-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003469
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003470- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3471
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003472- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3473 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3474 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3475 with Python 2.3a2.
3476
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003477- os.path exposes getctime.
3478
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003479- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003480 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003481 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003482 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003483 unit tests of floating point results.
3484
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003485- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3486 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3487 has been increased.
3488
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003489- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3490 executed.
3491
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003492- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3493 postinstallation script.
3494
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003495- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3496 test the current module.
3497
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003498- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003499 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3500 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3501 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3502 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3503
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003504- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003505 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003506 Ward's Optik package.
3507
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003508- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3509 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3510 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3511 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3512
3513- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3514 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003515 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003516
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003517- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3518 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3519 shelf are binary pickles.
3520
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003521- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3522 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3523
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003524- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3525 modules are iterators now.
3526
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003527- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3528 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3529 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3530 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3531 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3532 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003533
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003534- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3535 with their entity value.
3536
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003537- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3538
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003539- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3540 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003541
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003542- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3543 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003544 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003545
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003546- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3547 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3548 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3549 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3550 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3551 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3552 main():
3553
3554 import locale
3555 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3556
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003557- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3558 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3559
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003560- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3561 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3562 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3563 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3564 to the new standard.
3565
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003566- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3567 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3568 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3569 an extension to the database.
3570
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003571- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3572 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3573 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3574 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003575 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003576
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003577- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003578 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003579
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003580- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3581 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3582 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3583 bounded integers.
3584
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003585- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3586 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3587 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3588 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3589 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3590 in existence.
3591
3592 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3593 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3594 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3595 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3596 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3597 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3598
3599 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3600 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3601 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3602 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3603
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003604- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3605 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3606 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3607
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003608- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3609
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003610- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3611 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3612 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3613 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3614
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003615- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3616 argument.
3617
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003618- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3619 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3620 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3621 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3622 [SF patch 560794].
3623
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003624- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3625 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3626 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003627 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3628 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3629 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003630
3631- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3632 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003633
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003634- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3635 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3636 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3637 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003638
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003639- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3640 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3641 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3642 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3643 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3644
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003645- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003646
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003647- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3648
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003649- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3650 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3651 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3652 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3653 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3654 identical to None.
3655
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003656- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3657 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3658 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3659 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3660 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3661 results now.
3662
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003663- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3664 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3665
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003666- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3667 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3668 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3669 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3670 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3671 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3672 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3673 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3674
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003675- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3676
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003677- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3678 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3679
3680- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3681 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3682 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3683 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3684 and other systems.
3685
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003686- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3687 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3688 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3689 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 +00003690 work well with these.
3691
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003692- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3693
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003694- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003695 connections.
3696
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003697- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3698 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3699 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3700
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003701- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3702 sets
3703
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003704- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3705 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3706 name.
3707
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003708- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3709 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3710 passed in.
3711
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003712- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003713 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003714 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3715 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003716
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003717- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3718
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003719- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3720
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003721- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3722 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3723 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3724
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003725- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3726 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3727 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3728 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003729 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003730
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003731- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003732 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003733 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003734
3735- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3736 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3737 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3738
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003739- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003740 the value of its expression argument.
3741
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003742- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3743 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3744 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3745
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003746- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3747 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3748 skipstone browser was included.
3749
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003750- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3751 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3752
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003753Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003754-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003755
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003756- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3757 names in addition to accepting file names.
3758
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003759- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3760 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3761 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3762 still used and useful.)
3763
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003764- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3765 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3766 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3767 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003768
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003769- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3770 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3771 the generated binary.
3772
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003773Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003775
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003776- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3777
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003778- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3779 except in the hands of experts.
3780
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003781- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003782 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3783 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3784 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003785
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003786- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3787 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3788 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3789 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3790 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3791 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3792 builds.
3793
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003794- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3795 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3796 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3797 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3798 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3799 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3800 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3801 new type.
3802
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003803- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003804
3805 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3806 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3807 positive infinities.
3808
3809 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3810 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3811 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3812 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3813 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3814 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3815 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3816
3817 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3818
3819 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3820
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003821- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3822 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3823 size of the executable.
3824
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003825- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3826 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3827 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3828 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003829
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003830- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3831
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003832- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3833 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3834 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003835
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003836- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3837 well as Unix.
3838
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003839- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3840 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3841 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3842 modules in the README file for details.
3843
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003844C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003845-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003846
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003847- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3848 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003849 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003850 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003851 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003852
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003853- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3854 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3855 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3856 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3857 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3858 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003859 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003860 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3861 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3862 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3863 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3864 aligned.)
3865
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003866- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3867 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3868 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3869
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003870- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3871 level.
3872
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003873- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3874 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3875 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3876 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3877 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3878
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003879- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3880 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3881 code.
3882
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003883- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3884 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3885 adjusting for negative indices.
3886
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003887- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3888 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3889 object.
3890
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003891- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3892 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3893 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3894
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003895- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3896 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003897
3898- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3899
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003900- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3901 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3902 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3903 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3904
3905- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3906
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003907- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003908
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003909- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003910 without going through the buffer API.
3911
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003913
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003914- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3915 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3916 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3917 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3918
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003919- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3920 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3921
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003922- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003923 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3924
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003925New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003927
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003928- OpenVMS is now supported.
3929
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003930- AtheOS is now supported.
3931
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003932- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3933
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003934- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3935
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003936Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937-----
3938
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003939- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3940 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3941 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003942
3943Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003944-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003945
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003946- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3947 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3948 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3949 bugs.
3950 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003951 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003952 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3953 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003954 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003955
3956- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003957 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003958
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003959- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3960 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3961
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003962- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3963 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003964 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003965 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3966
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003967- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3968 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3969 use files" uninstall option).
3970
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003971- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3972
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003973- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3974 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3975
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003976- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3977 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3978 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3979
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003980- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3981 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3982 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3983 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3984 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003985 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3986 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3987 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003988
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003989- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003990 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003991 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3992 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3993 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3994 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3995 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3996 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3997 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3998 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3999 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4000 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4001 work around.
4002
4003- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4004 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4005 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4006 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4007 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4008 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4009 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4010 specified with O_CREAT too).
4011
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004012Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013----
4014
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004015- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004016
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004017- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4018 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4019 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4020
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004021- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4022 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4023 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4024
4025- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4026 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4027 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4028 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4029 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4030 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4031 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4032 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004033
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004034- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4035 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4036 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004037
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004038- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4039 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4040 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4041 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4042 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004043
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004044- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4045 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4046 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004047
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004048- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4049 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004050
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004051- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4052 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4053 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4054 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4055 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004056
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004057- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4058 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4059 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4060
4061- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4062 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4063 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004064
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004065- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4066 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4067 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4068 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004069 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004070
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004071- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4072 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004073
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004074- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4075 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004076
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004077- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004078 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004079 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4080 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004081
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004082
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004083What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004084===============================
4085
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4087
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004088Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004089--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004090
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004091- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4092 with a custom metaclass.
4093
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004094Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004095-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004096
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004097- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4098 are proxies.
4099
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004100Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004101-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004102
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004103- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4104 very short strings.
4105
4106- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4107 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4108 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4109 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4110 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4111
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004112Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004113-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004114
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004115- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4116 close or delete time).
4117
4118- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4119 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4120
4121- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4122
4123- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004124 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004125
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004126Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004127-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004128
4129Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004131
4132C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004134
4135New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004136-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004137
4138Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004140
4141Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004142-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004143
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004144- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4145
4146- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4147 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4148
4149- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4150 deleted at process exit time.
4151
4152- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4153 in backslash.
4154
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004155Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004156----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004157
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004158- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4159 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4160 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4161
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004162
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004163What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004164===========================
4165
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4167
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004168Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004169--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004170
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004171- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4172 been extensively updated. See
4173
4174 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4175
4176 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4177
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004178- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4179 deleted!
4180
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004181- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4182 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4183 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4184 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4185 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4186
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004187- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4188
4189 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4190 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4191
4192 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4193 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4194 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4195 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4196 supported anyway.
4197
4198 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4199 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4200
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004201- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4202 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4203 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4204 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4205 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004206
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004207- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4208 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4209 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4210
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004211Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004212-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004213
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004214- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4215 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4216 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4217 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4218 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4219 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004220 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4221 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4222 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4223 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004224
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004225- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4226 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4227 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4228
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004229Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004230-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004231
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004232- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4233
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004234Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004236
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004237- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4238 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4239 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4240 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4241 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4242 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4243
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004244- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4245
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004246- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4247
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004248- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4249
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004250- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4251 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4252 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4253
4254- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4255
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004256Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004258
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004259- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4260 off a search on Google.
4261
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004262Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004264
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004265- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4266 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4267 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4268 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4269 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4270 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4271 other platforms should do likewise.
4272
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004273- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4274 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4275 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4276
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004277C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004278-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004279
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004280- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4281 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4282 producing key-value pairs.
4283
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004284- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004285 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004286 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4287 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4288 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4289 previously went unchallenged.
4290
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004291New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004293
4294Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004296
4297Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004299
4300Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004302
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004303- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4304 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004305
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004306- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4307 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4308 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4309 home.
4310
4311
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004312What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004313===========================
4314
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4316
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004317Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004319
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004320- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4321 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004322
4323 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004324 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004325
4326 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4327 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004328 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004329 This needs to be documented.
4330
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004331- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4332 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4333
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004334- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4335 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4336 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4337
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004338- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4339 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4340
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004341- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4342 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4343 class forbids it).
4344
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004345- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4346 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4347 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4348
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004349- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4350
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004351Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004352-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004353
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004354- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4355 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004356 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004357
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004358- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4359 (like 1 + '').
4360
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004361Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004363
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004364- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4365 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4366 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4367 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004368 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004369 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4370
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004371- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4372 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4373 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4374 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4375
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004376- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4377 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004378 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4379 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4380 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004381
4382- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4383 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004384
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004385- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4386 bytes on its input.
4387
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004388Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004390
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004391- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004392 convenience function.
4393
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004394- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4395 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4396 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004397 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4398 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4399 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4400 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4401 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4402 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004403
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004404- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4405 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4406 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4407 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4408
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004409- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4410 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4411 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4412
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004413- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4414 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4415 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4416 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4417
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004418- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4419 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004421 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4422 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4423 new -l and -e options.
4424
4425- statcache is now deprecated.
4426
4427- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4428 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004429 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004430 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4431 time properly taken into account.
4432
4433- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4434 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4435 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4436 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4437
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004438Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004440
4441Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004443
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004444- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4445 is built with libdb3 if available.
4446
4447- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4448
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004449C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004451
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004452- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4453 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4454 PySequence_Size().
4455
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004456- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4457
4458- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4459 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4460 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4461
4462- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4463 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4464
4465- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4466 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4467
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004468New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004470
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004471- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4472 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4473
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004474- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4475 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4476
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004477- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4478
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004479Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004480-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004481
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004482- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4483 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4484
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004485Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004486-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004487
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004488Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004490
4491- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4492 removed completely in the next release.
4493
4494- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4495 OSX.
4496
4497- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4498 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4499
4500- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4501
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004502
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004503What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004504===========================
4505
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4507
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004508Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004510
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004511- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004512 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004513 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004514 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4515 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004516 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4517 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004518 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4519 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004520
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004521- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4522 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4523
4524- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4525 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4526
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004527Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004528-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004529
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004530- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4531 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4532 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4533 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4534 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4535 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4536 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4537 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4538
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004539- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4540 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4541 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4542 example).
4543
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004544- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004545 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004546 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004547 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004548
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004549- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4550 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4551 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004552 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004553
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004554- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4555 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4556 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4557 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4558 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4559 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4560
4561 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4562
4563 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4564
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004565Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004567
4568- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4569
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004570- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4571
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004572- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4573 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004574
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004575- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4576 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4577 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4578 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4579 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4580 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004581 attributes.
4582
4583- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4584 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4585 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004586
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004587- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4588 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4589 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004590
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004591- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4592 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4593 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004594 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4595 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4596
4597- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4598 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004599
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004600Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004601-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004602
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004603- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4604 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4605
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004606- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4607 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4608 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4609 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4610
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004611- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4612 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4613 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4614 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4615
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004616 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4617 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4618 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4619 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4620 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4621 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4622 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4623 without losing information).
4624
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004625- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004626 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4627 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4628 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4629 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4630 module).
4631
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004632 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004633 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4634 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4635 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4636 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004637
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004638- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004639 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4640 encoding.
4641
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004642- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4643 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4644
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004645- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004646 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4647
4648- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4649 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4650 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4651 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4652
4653- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4654
4655- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4656 ON, and OFF.
4657
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004658- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4659 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4660
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004661Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004663
4664- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4665 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4666 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004667
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004668- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4669 been added: -X and -E.
4670
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004671Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004672-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004673
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004674- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4675 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4676
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004677C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004679
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004680- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4681 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4682 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4683 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4684 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4685
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004686- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4687 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4688 as long) arguments.
4689
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004690- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4691 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4692 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4693 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4694 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4695 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4696
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004697- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4698 input.
4699
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004700New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004702
4703Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004704-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004705
4706Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004708
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004709- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4710 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4711 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4712
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004713- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4714 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4715 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004716 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004717
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4719 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4720 import signal
4721 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004722
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004724 while 1:
4725 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004727 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4728 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4729 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4730 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004731
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004732
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004733What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4734===========================
4735
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004736*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4737
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004738Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004740
4741- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4742 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4743 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4744
4745- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4746 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4747 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4748 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4749 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4750 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4751 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004752
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004753- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004754 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004755 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4756 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4757 associate a docstring with a property.
4758
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004759- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4760 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4761 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4762 other built-in object types.
4763
4764- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4765 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4766 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4767 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4768 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4769
4770- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4771 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4772
4773- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4774 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004775 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004776 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4777 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4778 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4779 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4780 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4781
4782- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4783 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4784 class.
4785
4786- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4787 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4788 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4789 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4790
4791- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4792 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4793 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4794 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4795
4796- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4797 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4798
4799- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4800 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4801 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4802 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4803 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004804 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004805 with the same value as s.
4806
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004807- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4808
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004809Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004810----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004811
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004812- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4813
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004814- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4815 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4816 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4817 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4818 objects.
4819
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004820- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4821 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004822 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4823 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4824
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004825- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4826 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4827 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4828
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004829Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004831
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004832- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4833 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4834 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4835 by the instances.
4836
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004837- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4838 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4839 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4840
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004841- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4842 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4843 before the entire comparison is complete.
4844
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004845- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4846 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4847 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4848
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004849- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4850 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4851 getwriter().
4852
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004853- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4854 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4855
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004856- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004857 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4858 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4859
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004860- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4861 iterable object.
4862
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004863- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4864 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004865
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004866- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4867 authentication.
4868
4869- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4870 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004871
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004872- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004873 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4874 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4875 a sample driver.)
4876
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004877Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004879
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004880- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4881 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4882 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4883 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4884 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4885 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4886 kernel has large file support.
4887
4888- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4889 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4890 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4891 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4892 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4893
4894- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4895 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4896 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4897
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004898C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004899-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004900
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004901- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4902 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4903
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004904New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004906
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004907- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4908 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4909
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004910Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004911-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004912
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004913- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4914 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4915 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4916 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4917 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4918
4919- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4920 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4921 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4922 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4923
4924- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4925 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4926
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004927Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004928-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004929
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004930- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004931 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4932 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004933
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004934
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004935What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4936===========================
4937
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4939
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004940Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004942
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004943- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4944 big to represent as a C double.
4945
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004946- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4947 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4948 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4949 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4950 restriction).
4951
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004952- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4953 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4954 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4955 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4956 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4957
4958 >>> dir([])
4959 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4960 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4961 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4962 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4963 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4964 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4965 'reverse', 'sort']
4966
4967 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4968
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004969- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004970 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4971 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4972 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4973 OverflowError exception.
4974
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004975- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004976 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004977 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4978 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4979 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4980 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4981 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004982 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4984 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4985
4986 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4987 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4988 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4989 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004990
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004991- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004992 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4993 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4994 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4995 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4996 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4997 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4998 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4999 once it is created.
5000
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005001- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5002 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5003 (key, value) pairs.
5004
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005005- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005006 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5007 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5008
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005009- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5010 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5011 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5012 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5013 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005014
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005015- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005016 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5017 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5018
5019 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5020
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005021- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005022 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5023
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005024Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005026
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005027- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005028 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5029 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005030
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005031- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5032 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5033 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5034 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5035 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5036 in this area anymore).
5037
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005038- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5039 threading.Timer.
5040
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005041- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5042 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5043
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005044- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005045 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5046
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005047- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005048 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5049 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5050 converted to Python longs.
5051
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005052- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005053 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5054
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005055- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5056 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5057 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5058
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005059Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005061
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005062- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5063 division operators as per PEP 238.
5064
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005065Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005066-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005067
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005068- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5069 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5070 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5071 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5072
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005073C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005075
5076- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005077
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005078- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5079 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005080 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005081
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5083 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005084 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005085 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005086
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005087- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005088 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5089 module:
5090
5091 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005092
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005093 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5094 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005095
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005096 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5097 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005098
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005099 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5100
5101 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5102
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005103- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005104 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5105 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5106 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005107
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005108New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005110
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005111- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5112 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5113 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5114 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5115 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005116
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005117Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005119
5120Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005121-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005122
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005123- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5124 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5125 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5126 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005127 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5128 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5129 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5130 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5131 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005132
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005133- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005134 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5135
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005136
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005137What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5138===========================
5139
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5141
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005142Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005143-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005144
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005145- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5146 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5147
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005148- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5149 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5150 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005151
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005152- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5153 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5154 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5155 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005156
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005157- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5158
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005160
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005161Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005162-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005163
5164- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005165 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005166 the module docstring for details.
5167
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005168Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005169-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005170
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005171- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005172 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5173 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5174 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005175
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005176- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5177 Nick Mathewson.
5178
5179Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005181
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005182- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5183 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5184 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5185 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5186 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5187 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5188 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5189 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5190
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005191- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5192 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5193 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5194 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5195
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005196- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5197 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5198 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5199 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5200 come a long way).
5201
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005202- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5203 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5204 write filters for these warnings).
5205
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005206- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5207 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5208 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5209 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5210 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5211
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005212- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5213 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5214 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5215 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5216 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5217 older distribution.
5218
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005219Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005221
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005222- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5223 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005224 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005225
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005226- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5227 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5228 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5229
5230- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5231
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005232- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5233
5234- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5235
5236- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5237
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005238- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005239
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005240- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5241
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005242New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005243-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005244
5245C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005246-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005247
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005248- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5249 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5250 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5251 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5252 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5253 against buffer overruns.
5254
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005255- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005256 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5257 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005258 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5259 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5260 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5261
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005262- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5263 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5264 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5265 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5266 deprecated.
5267
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005268Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005269-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005270
5271- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5272 relevant is found.
5273
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005274
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005275What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005276===========================
5277
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005278*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5279
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005280Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005281----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005282
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005283- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5284 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5285 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5286 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5287 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5288 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5289 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5290 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005291 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005292 repaired.
5293
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005294- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005295 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005296 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5297 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5298 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5299 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5300 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5301 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5302 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5303 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5304
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005305- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5306 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5307 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5308 leading BMO character).
5309
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005310- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5311 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5312 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5313
5314 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5315 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5316 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005317
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005318 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5319 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5320 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5321 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5322 for various simple to use conversions.
5323
5324 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5325 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5326
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005327 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5328 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5329 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5330 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5331 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5332 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5333 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5334 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5335 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5336 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5337 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5338 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5339 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5340 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5341 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005342
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005343- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5344 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5345 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005346 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005347 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005348
5349 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005350 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5351 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5352 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5353 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5354 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005355 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5356 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005357
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005358 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5359 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5360 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005361 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005362
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005363- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5364 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5365 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5366 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5367 floating arithmetic,
5368
5369 x = 9007199254740992.0
5370 print long(x)
5371
5372 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5373 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5374 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5375 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5376 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5377 functions are of good quality).
5378
5379 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5380 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5381 algorithms to break.
5382
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005383- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5384 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5385 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5386 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5387 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5388 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5389 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5390 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5391 order.
5392
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005393- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5394 operation along the most common code paths.
5395
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005396- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5397 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5398
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005399- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5400 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5401 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5402 {}.update(UserDict())
5403
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005404- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5405 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5406 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5407 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5408 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5409 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5410 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5411 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5412
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005413- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005414 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005415
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005416 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005417 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5418 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005419 join() method of strings
5420 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005421 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5422 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005423 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005424 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005425
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005426- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5427 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5428
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005429- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5430 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5431
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005432- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5433 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5434 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5435 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5436
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005437- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5438 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005439 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005440 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5441 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005442
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005443- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5444
5445
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005446Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005447-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005448
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005449- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005450 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005451 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5452 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5453
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005454- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5455 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5456
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005457- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5458 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5459 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5460 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5461
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005462- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5463 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5464 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5465
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005466- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5467
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005468- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5469
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005470- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5471 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5472 that are still imported into string.py).
5473
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005474- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5475
5476- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5477 Now it does.
5478
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005479- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5480
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005481- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5482 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5483 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5484 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5485 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005486 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5487 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005488
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005489- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5490 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5491 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5492 'help(object)'.
5493
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005494Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005495-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005496
5497- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005498 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005499 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5500 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5501
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005502- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005503 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5504 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005505
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005506C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005507-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005508
5509- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5510 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005511
5512----
5513
5514**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**