blob: c9b1e5fe544a57c7d61a8b0758528c281f5aaafc [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-XXXX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15...
16
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
20...
21
22Library
23-------
24
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +000025- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
26 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
27
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +000028- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
29
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +000030- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
31 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000032
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +000033- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
34
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000035Build
36-----
37
38...
39
40C API
41-----
42
43...
44
45Documentation
46-------------
47
48...
49
50Tests
51-----
52
53...
54
55Windows
56-------
57
58...
59
60Mac
61---
62
63...
64
65New platforms
66-------------
67
68...
69
70Tools/Demos
71-----------
72
73...
74
75
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000076What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
77================================
78
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +000079*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000080
81Core and builtins
82-----------------
83
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +000084- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
85 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
86
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +000087- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
88 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
89 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
90 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
91
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000092- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
93 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
94
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000095- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
96 constant.
97
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000098- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
99 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
100 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
101 large), and to anomalies such as
102 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
103 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
104 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
105 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000106
107Extension modules
108-----------------
109
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000110- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
111 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000112 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
113 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
114 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000115
116Library
117-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000118
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000119- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
120 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
121 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
122 --swig-cpp.
123
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000124- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
125 it is set.
126
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000127- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000128
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000129- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
130 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
131 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
132 Closes bug #1039270.
133
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000134- Updates for the email package:
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000135 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000136 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
137 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
138 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
139 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
140 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
141 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
142 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
143 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
144 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
145 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
146 + Updates to documentation.
147
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000148- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
149 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
150 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
151 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
152
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000153- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000154
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000155- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
156 applications should use the getmember function.
157
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000158- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
159
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000160- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
161 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
162 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
163 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
164 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
165 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
166 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
167 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
168 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
169
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000170- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
171 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000172 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000173
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000174- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
175 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
176 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
177 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
178 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
179 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
180 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
181 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000182
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000183- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
184 the new public features (of which there are many).
185
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000186- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000187 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
188 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
189 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
190 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000191 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000192
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000193- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
194
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000195- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
196 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
197 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
198 options.
199
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000200- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
201 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
202 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
203 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
204 conditions under which non-string values work.
205
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000206Build
207-----
208
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000209- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
210 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
211 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
212
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000213- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
214 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
215 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
216 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
217 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000218
219C API
220-----
221
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000222- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
223 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
224
225- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
226
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000227- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
228 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
229 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
230 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
231 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
232 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
233 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
234 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
235 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
236
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000237- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
238
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000239- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
240 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
241 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000242
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000243Tests
244-----
245
246- test__locale ported to unittest
247
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000248Mac
249---
250
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000251- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
252 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
253 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000254
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000255Tools/Demos
256-----------
257
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000258- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
259 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
260 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
261 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
262 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000263
264
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000265What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
266=================================
267
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000268*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000269
270Core and builtins
271-----------------
272
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000273- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000274 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
275
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000276- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
277 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
278 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
279 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
280 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
281 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
282 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
283 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000284 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
285 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
286 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
287 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
288 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000289
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000290- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
291 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
292 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
293 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
294 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
295
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000296- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
297
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000298- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
299 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
300
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000301- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
302 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
303 modified the list.
304
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000305- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
306 functions is now writable.
307
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000308- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
309 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
310 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
311 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
312
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000313- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
314 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
315 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
316 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
317 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000318
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000319- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
320 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
321
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000322Extension modules
323-----------------
324
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000325- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
326
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000327- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
328 data.
329
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000330- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
331 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
332 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
333 supposed to have been truncated away.
334
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000335- Added socket.socketpair().
336
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000337- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
338 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
339
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000340- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000341 versions of Python, have now been removed.
342
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000343Library
344-------
345
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000346- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000347 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000348
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000349- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
350 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
351
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000352- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
353 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
354
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000355- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
356
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000357- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
358 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000359
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000360- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
361 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
362
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000363- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
364
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000365- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
366
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000367- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
368
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000369- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
370 Percivall.
371
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000372- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
373 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
374
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000375- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
376 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
377 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000378 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000379
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000380- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
381 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
382 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
383 and exponent.
384
385- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
386
387- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
388 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
389 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
390
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000391- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
392 to the readline module.
393
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000394- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000395 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
396 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000397
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000398- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
399 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
400 contains symlinks.
401
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000402- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
403 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
404
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000405- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
406 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
407 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
408
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000409- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
410 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
411 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
412 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
413 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
414 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
415 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
416 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
417 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
418 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
419 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
420 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
421 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
422
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000423- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
424
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000425Tools/Demos
426-----------
427
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000428- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
429 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
430
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000431- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
432
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000433Build
434-----
435
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000436- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
437 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
438 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
439 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
440 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
441 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
442 plans to do so.
443
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000444- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
445 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
446
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000447- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
448 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
449
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000450- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
451 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
452
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000453- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
454 GNU/k*BSD systems.
455
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000456- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
457 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
458
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000459C API
460-----
461
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000462..
463
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000464Documentation
465-------------
466
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000467- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
468 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
469
470- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
471 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
472 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000473
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000474New platforms
475-------------
476
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000477- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
478
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000479Tests
480-----
481
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000482..
483
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000484Windows
485-------
486
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000487- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
488 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
489 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
490 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
491 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
492 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
493 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
494 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
495 the problem.
496
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000497Mac
498---
499
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000500..
501
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000502
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000503What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
504=================================
505
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000506*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000507
508Core and builtins
509-----------------
510
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000511- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
512 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
513 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
514 sensitive code.
515
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000516- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000517 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000518
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000519 @staticmethod
520 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000521
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000522 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000523
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000524- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
525 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
526 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
527 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
528 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
529 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
530 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
531 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
532 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
533 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
534 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
535
536 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
537 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
538 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
539 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
540 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
541 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
542 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
543
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000544- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
545 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
546
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000547- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000548 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000549
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000550- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000551 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000552 which was missing for no apparent reason.
553
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000554- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000555 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
556 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
557
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000558- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
559 types that support garbage collection.
560
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000561- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
562
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000563- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
564 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
565 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
566 Jython.
567
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000568- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
569
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000570- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
571 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
572
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000573- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
574 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
575 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000576
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000577- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
578 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
579 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
580
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000581Extension modules
582-----------------
583
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000584- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
585
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000586Library
587-------
588
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000589- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
590 TIS-620
591
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000592- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
593 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
594 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
595 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
596 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
597 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
598 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
599 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
600 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
601 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
602
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000603- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
604
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000605- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
606 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
607 same as when the argument is omitted).
608 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
609
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000610- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
611
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000612- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
613 schemes are offered.
614
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000615- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
616
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000617- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
618 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
619 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
620
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000621- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
622
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000623- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
624 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
625
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000626- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
627 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
628 when dummy_threading is being used.
629
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000630- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
631 from a tarfile.
632
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000633- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000634 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000635
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000636- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
637 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
638 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
639 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
640
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000641- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
642 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
643
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000644- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
645 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
646 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
647 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
648 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
649 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
650 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
651 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
652 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
653 by some other method in progress).
654
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000655- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
656 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
657 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000658
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000659- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
660
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000661- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
662 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
663 AM Kuchling.
664
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000665- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
666 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
667 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
668
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000669- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
670 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
671 instead of unsigned.
672
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000673- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000674 no longer part of the public API.
675
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000676- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
677 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
678 string methods of the same name).
679
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000680- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000681 SF patch 945642.
682
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000683- doctest unittest integration improvements:
684
685 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
686
687 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
688 DocTestSuites.
689
690- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
691 that provide thread-local data.
692
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000693- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
694 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
695
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000696- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
697
698- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
699 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
700 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
701
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000702- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
703
704 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
705 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
706 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000707
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000708 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
709 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
710 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
711 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
712
713 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
714 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
715
716 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
717 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
718 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
719 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
720
721 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
722 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
723 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
724 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
725 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
726
727 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
728 wrapping help output.
729
730 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
731 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
732 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000733
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000734C API
735-----
736
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000737- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
738 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
739 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
740 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
741 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
742 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
743 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
744 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
745 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
746 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
747 its visible semantics have not changed.
748
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000749- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
750 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
751
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000752Documentation
753-------------
754
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000755- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000756
757 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000758 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000759
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000760 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000761
762 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
763
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000764- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000765
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000766Tests
767-----
768
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000769- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000770 platforms that use the Makefile.
771
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000772- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
773 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
774 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
775
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000776
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000777What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
778=================================
779
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000780*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000781
782Core and builtins
783-----------------
784
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000785- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
786 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
787 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
788 objects now (one object instead of three).
789
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000790- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
791 Windows DLLs.
792
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000793- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
794 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000795
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000796- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
797 a new .pyc magic.
798
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000799- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
800 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
801 be there.
802
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000803- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
804 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
805 the LC_NUMERIC category.
806
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000807- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
808 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
809 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
810
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000811- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
812
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000813- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
814 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
815 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000816
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000817- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
818 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
819
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000820- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
821
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000822- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000823 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000824
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000825- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
826
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000827- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
828
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000829- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
830 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
831
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000832- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
833 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
834 Fixes bug #858016 .
835
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000836- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
837 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
838 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
839
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000840- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
841 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
842 improves their performance (about 35%).
843
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000844- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
845 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
846 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
847
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000848- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
849 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
850 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
851 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
852
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000853- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
854 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
855 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
856 length is not known).
857
858- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
859 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000860 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
861 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000862 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
863
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000864- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
865 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
866
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000867- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
868 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
869 keyword arguments.
870
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000871- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
872 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
873 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
874
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000875- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
876 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
877 cases.
878
879- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
880 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
881 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
882 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
883 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
884 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
885 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
886 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
887 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
888 a release build.
889
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000890- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
891 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
892
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000893- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000894 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000895
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000896- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
897 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
898 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
899 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
900 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
901 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
902 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
903 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
904 destroyed.
905
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000906- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
907 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
908 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
909 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
910 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
911 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
912 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
913 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
914
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000915- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
916 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
917 character other than a space.
918
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000919- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
920 by the function object or by the method object, the function
921 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
922 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
923 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
924 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
925 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
926 attributes with the same name.
927
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000928- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
929 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
930 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
931 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
932 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
933 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
934 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
935 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
936 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
937 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
938 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
939 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
940 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
941 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000942
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000943- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
944 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
945 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
946 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
947 This has been repaired.
948
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000949- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
950
951- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
952
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000953- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
954 over a sequence.
955
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000956- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000957 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000958
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000959- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
960
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000961- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
962 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
963 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
964 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
965 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
966 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
967 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
968 records with equal keys is unchanged).
969
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000970- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
971 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
972 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
973
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000974- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
975 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
976 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
977 freelist.
978
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000979- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
980 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
981
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000982- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
983 number.
984
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000985- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
986 a TypeError exception.
987
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000988- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
989 820195.
990
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000991- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
992 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
993 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
994
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000995- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000996 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
997 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000998
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000999- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1000 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1001 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1002
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001003- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1004 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001005 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001006
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001007- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001008 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1009 the first call.
1010
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001011
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001012Extension modules
1013-----------------
1014
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001015- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1016 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1017
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001018- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1019 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1020 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1021 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1022 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1023 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1024 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001025
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001026- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1027
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001028- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1029
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001030- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1031 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1032
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001033- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1034 fewer false positives.
1035
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001036- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1037 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1038
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001039- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001040 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1041
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001042- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001043 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001044 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001045 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1046 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001047
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001048- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1049 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1050 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1051 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1052
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001053- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1054 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1055 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1056 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1057 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1058 #897625.
1059
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001060- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1061 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1062
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001063- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1064 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1065 and pops on either side of the deque.
1066
1067- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1068 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1069
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001070- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1071 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1072 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1073 other functions that expect a function argument.
1074
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001075- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1076
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001077- os.getsid was added.
1078
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001079- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1080 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1081 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1082
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001083- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1084
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001085- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1086
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001087- readline.clear_history was added.
1088
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001089- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1090
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001091- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1092
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001093- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1094
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001095- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1096
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001097- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1098
1099- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1100
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001101- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1102
1103- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1104
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001105- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1106 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1107 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1108
1109- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1110 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1111 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1112 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1113 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1114 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1115 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1116
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001117- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1118 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1119 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1120 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001121
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001122- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001123 iterators from a single iterable.
1124
1125- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1126 of raising a TypeError exception.
1127
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001128- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1129 as parameter.
1130
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001131Library
1132-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001133
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001134- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1135 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1136 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001137
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001138- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1139 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1140 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001141
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001142- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001143
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001144- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1145 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001146
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001147- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1148 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1149
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001150- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1151
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001152- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001153 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001154
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001155- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001156 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001157
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001158- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1159
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001160- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1161 on cygwin and mingw32.
1162
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001163- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1164
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001165- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1166 module.
1167
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001168- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1169 installation scheme for all platforms.
1170
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001171- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001172 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001173
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001174- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1175 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1176 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1177
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001178- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1179 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1180 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1181
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001182- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1183
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001184- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1185
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001186- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1187 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1188
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001189- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1190 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1191 type pattern with the same value exists.
1192
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001193- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1194 when run from the command prompt).
1195
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001196- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1197 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1198
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001199- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1200 default sort).
1201
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001202- Added global runctx function to profile module
1203
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001204- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1205
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001206- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1207
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001208- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1209
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001210- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001211 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1212 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1213 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1214 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1215 accordingly.
1216
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001217- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1218 decoding standards.
1219
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001220- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1221 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1222 called for all requests.
1223
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001224- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1225 they are passed to the compiler.
1226
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001227- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1228 indent, width and depth.
1229
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001230- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1231 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1232
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001233- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1234 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1235
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001236- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1237
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001238- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1239
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001240- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1241
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001242- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1243 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1244
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001245- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001246 for better performance.
1247
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001248- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001249
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001250- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1251 a string).
1252
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001253- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1254
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001255- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1256
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001257- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1258
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001259- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1260
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001261- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1262 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1263 list of fieldnames.
1264
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001265- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1266 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1267
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001268- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1269
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001270- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1271 empty lists.
1272
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001273- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1274 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1275 and shelves.
1276
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001277- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1278 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1279
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001280- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001281 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1282 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001283
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001284- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1285 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001286 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001287
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001288- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001289 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1290 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1291
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001292- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1293 and removed in Py2.4.
1294
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001295- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1296
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001297- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1298
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001299Tools/Demos
1300-----------
1301
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001302- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1303 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1304
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001305- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1306
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001307- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1308 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1309 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1310 destination in situations where both files are given.
1311
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001312- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1313 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1314 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1315 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1316
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001317- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1318
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001319- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1320 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1321 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1322 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1323 now.
1324
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001325- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1326 in effect
1327
1328- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1329 C-c C-h
1330
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001331- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1332 -d option was given.
1333
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001334Build
1335-----
1336
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001337- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1338 build under OS X.
1339
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001340- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1341 --enable-profiling.
1342
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001343- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1344 is configured --with-tsc.
1345
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001346- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1347 on AMD64.
1348
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001349- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1350 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1351
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001352- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1353 removed.
1354
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001355- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1356 supported (see PEP 11).
1357
1358- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1359
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001360- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1361
1362- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1363 (see PEP 11).
1364
1365- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1366 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1367
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001368C API
1369-----
1370
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001371- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1372 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1373 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1374
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001375- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1376 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1377 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1378 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1379
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001380- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1381 generator objects.
1382
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001383- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1384 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001385 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1386 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001387
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001388- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1389 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1390
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001391- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1392 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1393 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1394 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1395 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1396
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001397- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1398 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1399 about 10% faster.
1400
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001401- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1402 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1403
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001404- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1405 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1406 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1407 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1408
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001409Windows
1410-------
1411
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001412- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1413 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1414 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1415 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1416
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001417- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1418 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1419 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1420
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001421
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001422What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1423===============================
1424
1425*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1426
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001427IDLE
1428----
1429
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001430- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1431 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1432 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1433 context-menu actions.
1434
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001435- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1436 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1437 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1438 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1439 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1440 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1441 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1442 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1443 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1444
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001445
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001446What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1447=============================================
1448
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001449*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001450
1451Core and builtins
1452-----------------
1453
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001454- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001455 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001456 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1457
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001458Extension modules
1459-----------------
1460
1461- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1462 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1463 than once. This has been fixed.
1464
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001465- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1466 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1467 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1468 call.
1469
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001470- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1471
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001472Library
1473-------
1474
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001475- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1476 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1477
1478- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1479 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1480 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1481 restored.
1482
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001483IDLE
1484----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001485
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001486- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001487
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001488Build
1489-----
1490
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001491- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1492 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1493
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001494C API
1495-----
1496
1497Windows
1498-------
1499
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001500- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1501 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1502
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001503- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1504
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001505Mac
1506---
1507
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001508- Various fixes to pimp.
1509
1510- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1511
1512- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1513 more problems than it solves.
1514
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001515
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001516What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1517=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001518
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001519*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1520
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001521Core and builtins
1522-----------------
1523
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001524- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1525 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1526
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001527- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1528 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001529 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001530
1531- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1532 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1533 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001534 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001535
1536- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1537 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001538
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001539- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1540 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1541 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1542
1543- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001544 770247.
1545
1546- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001547
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001548Extension modules
1549-----------------
1550
1551- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1552 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1553
1554- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1555
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001556- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1557
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001558- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1559 contained within the _strptime module.
1560
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001561- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1562 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1563
1564- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001565 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1566
1567- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1568 the find_class attribute, if present.
1569
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001570- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001571
1572 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1573 (SF bug 763298).
1574
1575 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001576 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1577 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1578 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001579
1580 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1581
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001582Library
1583-------
1584
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001585- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1586
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001587- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1588 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1589 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1590 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1591 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1592 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1593 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1594 or Tester().
1595
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001596- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1597 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1598 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1599 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1600 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1601 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1602 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1603 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1604 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001605
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001606 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001607
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001608- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1609 weren't before was an oversight.
1610
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001611- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1612 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1613
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001614- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1615 when there are no lines.
1616
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001617- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1618 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1619
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001620- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1621 to child processes.
1622
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001623- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1624
1625- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1626
1627- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1628 xmlrpclib.
1629
1630- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1631 responses.
1632
1633- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1634 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1635
1636- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1637 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1638 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1639
1640- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1641 used as patterns.
1642
1643- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1644 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1645 than Tk 8.3.
1646
1647- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1648
1649- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001650
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001651Tools/Demos
1652-----------
1653
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001654- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1655
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001656- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1657
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001658- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001659
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001660Build
1661-----
1662
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001663- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1664
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001665- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1666
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001667- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1668 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001669
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001670- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1671 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1672 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001673
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001674C API
1675-----
1676
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001677- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1678 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1679
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001680Windows
1681-------
1682
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001683- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1684 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1685 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1686 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1687 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1688 Python exception ::
1689
1690 thread.error: can't start new thread
1691
1692 is raised now.
1693
1694- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1695 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1696 instead of from DLL teardown.
1697
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001698Mac
1699---
1700
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001701- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001702 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001703 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1704 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1705 the executable in the bundle.
1706
1707- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001708
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001709- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1710
1711- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1712 on Panther.
1713
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001714What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1715================================
1716
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001717*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001718
1719Core and builtins
1720-----------------
1721
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001722- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1723 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1724 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1725 with the -i option.
1726
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001727- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1728 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1729
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001730- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1731 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1732
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001733- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1734 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1735 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1736 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1737 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1738 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1739 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1740 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1741 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1742 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1743 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1744 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1745 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001746
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001747- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1748 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1749 embedded in a lambda expression.
1750
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001751- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1752 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1753 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1754 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1755 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1756
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001757- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1758 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1759 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1760
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001761- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1762 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1763
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001764- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1765 It's writable again.
1766
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001767- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1768 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1769 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001770 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001771
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001772- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1773 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1774 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1775
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001776Extension modules
1777-----------------
1778
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001779- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1780 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1781
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001782- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1783 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1784 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1785 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1786
1787- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1788 collection.
1789
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001790- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1791 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1792 unique within a single program run.
1793
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001794- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1795 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1796
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001797- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1798 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1799
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001800- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1801 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001802
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001803- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1804
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001805- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1806 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1807
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001808- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1809 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1810 for many BSD-derived systems.
1811
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001812
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001813Library
1814-------
1815
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001816- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1817 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1818 primary ones:
1819
1820 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1821 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1822 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1823
1824 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1825 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1826 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1827 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1828 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1829 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1830
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001831- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1832 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1833 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1834 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1835 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1836 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1837 argument.
1838
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001839- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1840 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1841 in the archive.
1842
1843- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1844 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1845
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001846- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1847 569574).
1848
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001849- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1850 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1851 no more.
1852
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001853- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1854 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1855 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1856 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1857 code coverage.
1858
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001859- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1860 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1861 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001862 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1863 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001864
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001865- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1866 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1867 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001868 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001869
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001870- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1871
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001872- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1873 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1874 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1875 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1876
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001877- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1878 handling.
1879
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001880- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1881 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1882
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001883- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1884 in socket.py.
1885
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001886- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1887
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001888- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1889 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1890 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1891 opener with proxy support.
1892
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001893- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1894
1895- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1896
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001897Tools/Demos
1898-----------
1899
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001900- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1901
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001902- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1903
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001904- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1905 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001906
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001907- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1908 files.
1909
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001910Build
1911-----
1912
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001913- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001914 different root directory.
1915
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001916C API
1917-----
1918
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001919- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1920 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1921 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1922 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1923 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1924 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1925 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1926 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1927 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1928 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1929
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001930- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1931 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1932 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1933 from Python.
1934
1935
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001936New platforms
1937-------------
1938
1939None this time.
1940
1941Tests
1942-----
1943
1944- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1945 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1946
1947Windows
1948-------
1949
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001950- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1951
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001952- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1953 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1954 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1955 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1956 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1957 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1958 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1959 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1960 that's what it's for.
1961
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001962Mac
1963---
1964
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001965- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1966 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1967 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1968 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001969- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1970 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1971- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001972
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001973SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1974------------------------------------
1975
1976430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1977598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1978622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1979661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1980683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1981697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1982713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1983724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1984727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1985729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1986730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1987731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1988732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1989733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1990735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1991740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1992744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1993745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1994747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1995749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1996751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1997753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1998755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1999757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2000760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2001
2002
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002003What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2004================================
2005
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002006*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002007
2008Core and builtins
2009-----------------
2010
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002011- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2012 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2013
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002014- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2015 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2016 and cannot be strings).
2017
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002018- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2019 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2020 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2021 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2022
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002023- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2024 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2025 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2026 Python itself.
2027
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002028- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2029 the referenced object, if it has one.
2030
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002031- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2032 the thread started at
2033 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2034
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002035- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2036 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2037 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2038 placed on a list index.
2039
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002040- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2041 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2042 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2043 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2044
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002045- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2046 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2047 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2048 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2049 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2050 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2051 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2052
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002053- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2054 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2055 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2056 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2057 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2058
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002059- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2060 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002061
2062- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2063 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2064 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2065 #693195.)
2066
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002067- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2068 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002069
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002070- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002071 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002072 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2073 interpreter executions, would fail.
2074
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002075- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002076 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002077 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002078
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002079Extension modules
2080-----------------
2081
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002082- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2083 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2084 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2085 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2086
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002087- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2088 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2089
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002090- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2091 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2092 and Greg Chapman.)
2093
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002094- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2095 recursively.
2096
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002097- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002098 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2099 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2100 leaks.
2101
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002102- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2103
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002104- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2105 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2106 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2107 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2108 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2109 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2110 #705836.
2111
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002112- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002113 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2114
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002115- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2116 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2117 See SF bug #692416.
2118
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002119- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2120 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2121
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002122- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2123 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2124 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002125
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002126- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002127 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2128 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2129
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002130- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2131 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2132 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2133 timeouts to work properly.
2134
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002135Library
2136-------
2137
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002138- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2139 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2140 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2141 future release.
2142
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002143- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2144 for querying platform dependent features.
2145
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002146- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002147
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002148- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2149 pickle protocol versions.
2150
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002151- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2152 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2153 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2154
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002155- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2156
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002157- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2158 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2159 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2160 modules.
2161
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002162- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2163 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2164 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2165
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002166- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2167 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2168
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002169- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2170 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2171 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2172
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002173- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002174 MS Office extensions.
2175
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002176- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2177 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2178
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002179- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2180 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2181
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002182- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2183 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2184 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2185 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2186 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2187 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2188
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002189- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2190 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2191 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002192
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002193- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2194 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2195 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2196
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002197- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2198
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002199- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2200 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2201 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2202
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002203Tools/Demos
2204-----------
2205
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002206- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2207 See the module docstring for details.
2208
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002209Build
2210-----
2211
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002212- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2213 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002214
2215C API
2216-----
2217
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002218- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2219
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002220- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2221 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2222 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2223
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002224- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2225 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002226
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002227 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2228 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2229 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002230
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002231- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002232 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2233
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002234- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2235 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2236 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002237
2238New platforms
2239-------------
2240
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002241None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002242
2243Tests
2244-----
2245
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002246- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2247 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002248
2249Windows
2250-------
2251
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002252- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2253 function.
2254
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002255- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2256 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002257
2258Mac
2259---
2260
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002261- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2262 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002263
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002264- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2265 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002266
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002267- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2268 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2269 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002270
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002271- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002272 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2273 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002274
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002275- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2276 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002277
2278
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002279What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2280=================================
2281
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002282*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002283
2284Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002285-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002286
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002287- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2288 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2289 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2290
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002291- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2292 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2293 (SF patch #664376.)
2294
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002295- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2296 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2297 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2298 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2299 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2300 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002301 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002302
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002303- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2304 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2305 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2306 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002307 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002308
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002309- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2310 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2311 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2312 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2313 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2314 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2315 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2316 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2317 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2318 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2319 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2320
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002321- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2322 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2323 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2324 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2325 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2326 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2327
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002328- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2329 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2330
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002331- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2332 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2333 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2334 case.)
2335
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002336- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2337 passed as unicode strings.
2338
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002339- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2340 See SF bug #683467.
2341
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002342- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2343 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2344
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002345- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2346
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002347- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2348
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002349- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2350 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2351 arguments.
2352
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002353- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2354 See SF bug #667147.
2355
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002356- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002357 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002358 See SF bug #676155.
2359
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002360- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002361 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002362 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2363 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2364 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2365 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2366 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2367 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002368
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002369Extension modules
2370-----------------
2371
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002372- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2373 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2374 tp_as_number pointer.
2375
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002376- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2377 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2378 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2379 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2380 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2381
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002382- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2383
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002384- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2385
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002386- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002387 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002388 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2389 patch #678531.)
2390
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002391- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2392 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2393
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002394- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2395 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2396
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002397- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2398
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002399- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2400 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2401 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2402
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002403- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2404
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002405- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2406 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2407
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002408- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002409
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002410- datetime changes:
2411
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002412 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2413
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002414 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2415 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2416 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2417 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2418 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2419 now.
2420
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002421 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002422 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2423 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002424
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002425 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002426 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002427 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2428 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2429 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2430 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002431
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002432 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2433 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2434 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002435 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2436
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002437 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2438 by a later example coded by Guido.
2439
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002440 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002441 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2442 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2443 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002444 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2445 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2446
2447 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2448 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2449 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2450 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2451 tzinfo subclass instance.
2452
2453 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2454 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2455 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2456 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2457 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2458 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2459 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2460 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002461
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002462 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2463 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2464 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2465 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2466 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002467 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2468
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002469 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002470
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002471 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2472 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2473 as a naive datetime object.
2474
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002475 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2476 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2477 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2478
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002479 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2480 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2481 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2482 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2483 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2484 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2485 comparison.
2486
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002487 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2488 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2489 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2490 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002491 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002492
2493 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002494
2495 and ::
2496
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002497 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2498
2499 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2500 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2501 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2502 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2503
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002504 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2505 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2506 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2507 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2508 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2509
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002510 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2511 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002512 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2513 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002514
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002515Library
2516-------
2517
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002518- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2519 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2520
2521- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2522 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2523 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2524 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2525 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2526 See PEP 307 for details.
2527
2528- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2529 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2530
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002531- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2532 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002533 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002534 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2535 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002536 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002537
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002538- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2539 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2540
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002541- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2542 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2543 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2544
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002545- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2546
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002547- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2548 exception.
2549
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002550- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2551 class.
2552
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002553- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2554 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2555 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2556
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002557- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2558 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2559
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002560- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002561 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2562 See SF bug #659228.
2563
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002564- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2565 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2566 See SF patch #651082.
2567
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002568- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002569
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002570- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2571 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2572
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002573- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002574 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002575
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002576- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2577 DOS paths from other platforms.
2578
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002579Tools/Demos
2580-----------
2581
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002582- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2583 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2584 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2585 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2586 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2587 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2588 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2589 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2590 example:
2591
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002592 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2593 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002594
2595 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2596
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002597
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002598Build
2599-----
2600
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002601- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2602 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2603 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002604 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2605
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002606 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2607
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002608- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2609 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2610 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2611 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2612 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2613 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2614 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2615 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2616 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2617
2618- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2619 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2620 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2621 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2622
2623- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2624 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2625
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002626C API
2627-----
2628
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002629- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2630 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002631
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002632- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2633 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2634 tp_as_number pointer.
2635
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002636- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2637 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2638 (SF #681367)
2639
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002640- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2641 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2642 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2643 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002644
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002645Tests
2646-----
2647
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002648- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002649 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2650 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2651 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2652 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2653 pydoc.)
2654
2655- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2656
2657- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002658
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002659Windows
2660-------
2661
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002662- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2663 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2664 time).
2665
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002666- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2667 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2668
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002669- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2670 release without strong cryptography.
2671
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002672- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002673 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002674
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002675- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2676 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2677
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002678Mac
2679---
2680
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002681- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2682 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002683
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002684- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2685 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2686 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002687
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002688- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2689 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002690
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002691- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2692 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2693 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2694 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002695
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002696- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002697 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2698 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2699 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002700
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002701
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002702What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002703=================================
2704
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002705*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002706
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002707Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002708--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002709
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002710- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2711
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002712- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2713 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002714 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002715 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002716 a different meaning than before.
2717
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002718- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002719 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002720 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002721
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002722- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002723 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002724 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002725
2726- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2727 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2728 and deallocation.
2729
2730- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2731 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2732
2733- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2734 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2735 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2736 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2737 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2738
2739- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2740 now detected by the garbage collector.
2741
2742- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2743 [SF bug 519621]
2744
2745- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2746 identifier.
2747
2748- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2749 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2750 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2751 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2752 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2753 [SF bug 563060]
2754
2755- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2756 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2757 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2758 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2759 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2760
2761- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2762 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2763 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2764
2765- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2766
2767- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2768 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2769 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2770 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2771 state of the slots would be lost.)
2772
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002773Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002774-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002775
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002776- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002777 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2778 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2779 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2780 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002781 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2782 Jython 2.1.
2783
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002784- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002785 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002786 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2787 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2788 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2789 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2790 these, see PEP 302.
2791
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002792- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2793 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2794 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2795
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002796- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2797 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2798 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2799
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002800- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2801 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2802 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2803
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002804- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2805 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2806 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2807 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2808 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2809 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2810 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2811 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2812 releases or implementations.
2813
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002814- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002815 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2816 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002817
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002818- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2819 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2820
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002821- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2822 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2823 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2824
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002825- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2826 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2827
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002828- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2829 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002830 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2831 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002832
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002833- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2834 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2835 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2836 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2837 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2838
2839 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2840 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2841 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2842 pattern.
2843
2844 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2845 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2846 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2847 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2848
2849 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2850 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2851 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2852 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2853 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2854 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2855
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002856- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2857 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2858 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2859 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2860 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2861 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2862 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2863 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002864
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002865- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2866 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2867 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2868 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2869 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002870 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2871 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2872 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2873 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2874 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2875 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2876 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002877
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002878- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2879 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2880
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002881- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2882 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2883 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2884 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2885 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2886 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2887 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2888 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2889 to Zack Weinberg!
2890
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002891- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2892 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2893 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2894 type. This has been fixed now.
2895
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002896- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2897 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2898 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2899
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002900- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2901 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2902 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2903 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2904 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2905 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2906 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2907 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002908 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002909
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002910- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2911 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2912 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002913
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002914- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2915 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2916 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2917 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2918 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2919 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2920 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2921 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002922 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002923 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2924 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2925
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002926- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2927 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2928 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2929 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2930 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2931 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2932 this.)
2933
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002934- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2935 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002936 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002937 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002938 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2939 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002940 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2941 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002942
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002943- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2944 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2945 currently running.
2946
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002947- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2948 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2949 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2950 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2951
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002952- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2953 as directory names.
2954
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002955- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2956 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2957
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002958- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2959 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2960
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002961- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002962 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2963 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002964
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002965- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2966 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2967 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2968 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2969 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2970
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002971- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2972 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2973 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2974 removed.
2975
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002976- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2977 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2978 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2979
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002980- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2981 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2982 to __debug__.
2983
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002984- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2985 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2986 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2987
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002988- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2989 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2990 deprecated now.
2991
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002992- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2993 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2994 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002995
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002996- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2997 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2998 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2999 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3000 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003001
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003002- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3003 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3004
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003005- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3006 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3007 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003008 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003009 is backward compatible.
3010
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003011- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3012 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3013 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3014 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3015 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3016
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003017- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3018 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3019 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3020 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3021 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3022 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003023
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003024- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3025 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3026
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003027- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3028 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3029
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003030- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3031 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3032 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3033 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3034 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3035
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003036- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3037 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3038 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3039
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003040- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003041 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3042
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003043- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3044 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3045 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003046
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003047- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3048 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3049
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003050- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3051 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3052 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3053
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003054- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3055
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003056Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003057-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003058
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003059- Added three operators to the operator module:
3060 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3061 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3062 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3063
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003064- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3065
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003066- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3067 archives.
3068
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003069- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3070 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3071 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3072
3073 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3074
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003075- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3076 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3077 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003078 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003079
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003080- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3081 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3082 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3083 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003084 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3085 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3086 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3087 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003088
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003089- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3090 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003091
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003092- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3093
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003094- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3095 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3096
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003097- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3098 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3099 supported.
3100
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003101- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3102
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003103- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3104 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003105
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003106- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3107 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3108
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003109- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3110
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003111- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3112 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3113
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003114- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3115 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3116 functions but callable type objects.
3117
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003118- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003119 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003120 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003121
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003122- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3123 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003124
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003125- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3126 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003127
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003128- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3129 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3130 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3131 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3132
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003133- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3134 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003135
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003136- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3137 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3138 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3139 and __imul__.
3140
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003141- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003142 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3143 is called.
3144
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003145- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3146 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3147 interpreter was compiled.
3148
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003149- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3150 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3151 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003152 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003153 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3154 1, not 2.
3155
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003156- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3157 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3158 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3159 limit.
3160
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003161- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3162 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3163 bug #623464.
3164
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003165- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3166 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3167 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3168 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3169
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003170Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003171-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003172
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003173- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3174
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003175- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3176 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3177 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3178 with Python 2.3a2.
3179
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003180- os.path exposes getctime.
3181
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003182- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003183 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003184 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003185 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003186 unit tests of floating point results.
3187
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003188- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3189 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3190 has been increased.
3191
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003192- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3193 executed.
3194
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003195- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3196 postinstallation script.
3197
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003198- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3199 test the current module.
3200
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003201- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003202 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3203 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3204 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3205 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3206
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003207- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003208 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003209 Ward's Optik package.
3210
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003211- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3212 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3213 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3214 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3215
3216- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3217 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003218 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003219
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003220- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3221 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3222 shelf are binary pickles.
3223
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003224- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3225 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3226
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003227- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3228 modules are iterators now.
3229
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003230- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3231 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3232 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3233 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3234 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3235 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003236
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003237- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3238 with their entity value.
3239
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003240- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3241
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003242- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3243 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003244
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003245- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3246 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003247 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003248
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003249- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3250 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3251 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3252 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3253 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3254 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3255 main():
3256
3257 import locale
3258 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3259
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003260- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3261 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3262
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003263- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3264 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3265 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3266 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3267 to the new standard.
3268
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003269- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3270 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3271 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3272 an extension to the database.
3273
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003274- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3275 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3276 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3277 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003278 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003279
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003280- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003281 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003282
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003283- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3284 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3285 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3286 bounded integers.
3287
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003288- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3289 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3290 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3291 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3292 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3293 in existence.
3294
3295 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3296 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3297 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3298 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3299 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3300 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3301
3302 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3303 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3304 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3305 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3306
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003307- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3308 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3309 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3310
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003311- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3312
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003313- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3314 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3315 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3316 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3317
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003318- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3319 argument.
3320
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003321- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3322 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3323 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3324 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3325 [SF patch 560794].
3326
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003327- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3328 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3329 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003330 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3331 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3332 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003333
3334- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3335 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003336
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003337- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3338 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3339 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3340 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003341
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003342- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3343 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3344 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3345 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3346 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3347
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003348- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003349
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003350- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3351
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003352- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3353 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3354 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3355 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3356 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3357 identical to None.
3358
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003359- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3360 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3361 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3362 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3363 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3364 results now.
3365
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003366- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3367 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3368
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003369- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3370 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3371 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3372 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3373 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3374 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3375 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3376 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3377
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003378- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3379
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003380- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3381 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3382
3383- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3384 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3385 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3386 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3387 and other systems.
3388
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003389- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3390 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3391 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3392 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 +00003393 work well with these.
3394
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003395- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3396
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003397- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003398 connections.
3399
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003400- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3401 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3402 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3403
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003404- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3405 sets
3406
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003407- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3408 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3409 name.
3410
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003411- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3412 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3413 passed in.
3414
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003415- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003416 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003417 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3418 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003419
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003420- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3421
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003422- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3423
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003424- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3425 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3426 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3427
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003428- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3429 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3430 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3431 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003432 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003433
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003434- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003435 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003436 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003437
3438- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3439 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3440 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3441
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003442- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003443 the value of its expression argument.
3444
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003445- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3446 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3447 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3448
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003449- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3450 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3451 skipstone browser was included.
3452
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003453- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3454 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3455
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003456Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003457-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003458
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003459- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3460 names in addition to accepting file names.
3461
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003462- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3463 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3464 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3465 still used and useful.)
3466
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003467- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3468 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3469 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3470 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003471
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003472- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3473 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3474 the generated binary.
3475
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003476Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003477-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003478
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003479- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3480
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003481- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3482 except in the hands of experts.
3483
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003484- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003485 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3486 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3487 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003488
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003489- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3490 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3491 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3492 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3493 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3494 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3495 builds.
3496
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003497- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3498 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3499 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3500 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3501 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3502 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3503 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3504 new type.
3505
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003506- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003507
3508 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3509 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3510 positive infinities.
3511
3512 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3513 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3514 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3515 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3516 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3517 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3518 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3519
3520 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3521
3522 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3523
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003524- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3525 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3526 size of the executable.
3527
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003528- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3529 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3530 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3531 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003532
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003533- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3534
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003535- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3536 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3537 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003538
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003539- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3540 well as Unix.
3541
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003542- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3543 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3544 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3545 modules in the README file for details.
3546
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003547C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003548-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003549
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003550- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3551 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003552 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003553 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003554 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003555
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003556- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3557 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3558 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3559 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3560 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3561 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003562 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003563 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3564 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3565 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3566 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3567 aligned.)
3568
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003569- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3570 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3571 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3572
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003573- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3574 level.
3575
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003576- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3577 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3578 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3579 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3580 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3581
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003582- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3583 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3584 code.
3585
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003586- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3587 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3588 adjusting for negative indices.
3589
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003590- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3591 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3592 object.
3593
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003594- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3595 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3596 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3597
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003598- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3599 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003600
3601- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3602
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003603- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3604 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3605 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3606 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3607
3608- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3609
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003610- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003611
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003612- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003613 without going through the buffer API.
3614
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003615- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003616
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003617- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3618 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3619 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3620 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3621
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003622- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3623 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3624
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003625- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003626 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3627
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003628New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003630
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003631- OpenVMS is now supported.
3632
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003633- AtheOS is now supported.
3634
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003635- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3636
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003637- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3638
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003639Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003640-----
3641
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003642- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3643 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3644 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003645
3646Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003647-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003648
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003649- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3650 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3651 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3652 bugs.
3653 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003654 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003655 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3656 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003657 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003658
3659- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003660 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003661
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003662- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3663 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3664
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003665- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3666 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003667 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003668 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3669
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003670- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3671 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3672 use files" uninstall option).
3673
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003674- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3675
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003676- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3677 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3678
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003679- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3680 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3681 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3682
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003683- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3684 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3685 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3686 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3687 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003688 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3689 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3690 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003691
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003692- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003693 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003694 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3695 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3696 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3697 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3698 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3699 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3700 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3701 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3702 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3703 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3704 work around.
3705
3706- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3707 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3708 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3709 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3710 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3711 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3712 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3713 specified with O_CREAT too).
3714
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003715Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003716----
3717
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003718- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003719
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003720- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3721 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3722 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3723
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003724- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3725 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3726 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3727
3728- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3729 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3730 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3731 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3732 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3733 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3734 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3735 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003736
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003737- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3738 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3739 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003740
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003741- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3742 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3743 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3744 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3745 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003746
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003747- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3748 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3749 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003750
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003751- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3752 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003753
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003754- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3755 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3756 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3757 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3758 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003759
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003760- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3761 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3762 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3763
3764- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3765 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3766 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003767
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003768- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3769 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3770 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3771 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003772 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003773
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003774- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3775 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003776
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003777- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3778 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003779
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003780- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003781 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003782 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3783 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003784
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003785
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003786What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003787===============================
3788
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3790
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003791Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003792--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003793
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003794- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3795 with a custom metaclass.
3796
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003797Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003798-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003799
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003800- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3801 are proxies.
3802
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003803Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003804-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003805
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003806- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3807 very short strings.
3808
3809- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3810 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3811 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3812 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3813 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3814
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003815Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003816-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003817
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003818- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3819 close or delete time).
3820
3821- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3822 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3823
3824- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3825
3826- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003827 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003828
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003829Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003830-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003831
3832Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003833-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003834
3835C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003836-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003837
3838New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003839-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003840
3841Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003842-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003843
3844Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003845-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003846
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003847- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3848
3849- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3850 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3851
3852- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3853 deleted at process exit time.
3854
3855- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3856 in backslash.
3857
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003858Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003860
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003861- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3862 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3863 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3864
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003865
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003866What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003867===========================
3868
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3870
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003871Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003873
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003874- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3875 been extensively updated. See
3876
3877 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3878
3879 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3880
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003881- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3882 deleted!
3883
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003884- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3885 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3886 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3887 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3888 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3889
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003890- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3891
3892 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3893 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3894
3895 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3896 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3897 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3898 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3899 supported anyway.
3900
3901 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3902 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3903
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003904- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3905 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3906 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3907 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3908 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003909
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003910- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3911 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3912 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3913
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003914Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003915-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003916
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003917- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3918 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3919 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3920 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3921 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3922 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003923 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3924 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3925 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3926 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003927
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003928- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3929 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3930 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3931
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003932Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003934
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003935- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3936
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003937Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003938-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003939
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003940- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3941 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3942 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3943 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3944 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3945 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3946
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003947- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3948
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003949- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3950
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003951- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3952
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003953- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3954 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3955 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3956
3957- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3958
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003959Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003961
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003962- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3963 off a search on Google.
3964
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003965Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003967
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003968- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3969 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3970 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3971 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3972 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3973 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3974 other platforms should do likewise.
3975
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003976- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3977 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3978 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3979
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003980C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003982
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003983- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3984 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3985 producing key-value pairs.
3986
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003987- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003988 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003989 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3990 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3991 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3992 previously went unchallenged.
3993
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003994New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003996
3997Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003999
4000Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004002
4003Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004005
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004006- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4007 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004008
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004009- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4010 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4011 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4012 home.
4013
4014
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004015What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004016===========================
4017
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4019
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004020Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004022
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004023- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4024 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004025
4026 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004027 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004028
4029 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4030 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004031 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004032 This needs to be documented.
4033
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004034- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4035 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4036
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004037- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4038 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4039 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4040
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004041- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4042 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4043
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004044- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4045 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4046 class forbids it).
4047
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004048- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4049 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4050 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4051
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004052- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4053
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004054Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004056
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004057- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4058 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004059 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004060
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004061- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4062 (like 1 + '').
4063
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004064Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004066
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004067- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4068 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4069 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4070 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004071 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004072 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4073
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004074- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4075 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4076 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4077 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4078
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004079- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4080 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004081 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4082 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4083 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004084
4085- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4086 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004087
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004088- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4089 bytes on its input.
4090
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004091Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004093
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004094- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004095 convenience function.
4096
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004097- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4098 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4099 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004100 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4101 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4102 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4103 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4104 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4105 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004106
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004107- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4108 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4109 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4110 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4111
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004112- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4113 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4114 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4115
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004116- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4117 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4118 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4119 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4120
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004121- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4122 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004124 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4125 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4126 new -l and -e options.
4127
4128- statcache is now deprecated.
4129
4130- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4131 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004133 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4134 time properly taken into account.
4135
4136- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4137 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4138 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4139 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4140
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004141Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004142-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004143
4144Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004146
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004147- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4148 is built with libdb3 if available.
4149
4150- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4151
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004152C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004154
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004155- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4156 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4157 PySequence_Size().
4158
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004159- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4160
4161- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4162 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4163 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4164
4165- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4166 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4167
4168- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4169 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4170
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004171New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004172-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004173
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004174- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4175 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4176
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004177- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4178 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4179
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004180- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4181
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004182Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004184
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004185- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4186 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4187
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004188Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004189-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004190
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004191Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004192----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004193
4194- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4195 removed completely in the next release.
4196
4197- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4198 OSX.
4199
4200- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4201 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4202
4203- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4204
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004205
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004206What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004207===========================
4208
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004209*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4210
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004211Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004212--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004213
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004214- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004215 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004216 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004217 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4218 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004219 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4220 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004221 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4222 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004223
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004224- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4225 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4226
4227- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4228 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4229
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004230Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004231-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004232
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004233- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4234 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4235 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4236 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4237 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4238 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4239 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4240 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4241
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004242- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4243 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4244 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4245 example).
4246
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004247- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004248 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004249 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004250 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004251
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004252- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4253 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4254 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004255 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004256
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004257- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4258 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4259 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4260 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4261 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4262 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4263
4264 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4265
4266 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4267
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004268Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004270
4271- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4272
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004273- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4274
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004275- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4276 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004277
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004278- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4279 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4280 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4281 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4282 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4283 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004284 attributes.
4285
4286- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4287 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4288 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004289
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004290- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4291 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4292 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004293
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004294- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4295 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4296 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004297 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4298 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4299
4300- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4301 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004302
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004303Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004305
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004306- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4307 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4308
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004309- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4310 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4311 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4312 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4313
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004314- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4315 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4316 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4317 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4318
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004319 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4320 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4321 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4322 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4323 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4324 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4325 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4326 without losing information).
4327
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004328- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004329 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4330 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4331 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4332 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4333 module).
4334
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004335 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004336 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4337 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4338 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4339 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004340
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004341- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004342 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4343 encoding.
4344
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004345- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4346 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4347
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004349 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4350
4351- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4352 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4353 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4354 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4355
4356- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4357
4358- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4359 ON, and OFF.
4360
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004361- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4362 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4363
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004364Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004365-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004366
4367- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4368 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4369 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004370
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004371- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4372 been added: -X and -E.
4373
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004374Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004376
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004377- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4378 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4379
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004380C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004382
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004383- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4384 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4385 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4386 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4387 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4388
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004389- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4390 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4391 as long) arguments.
4392
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004393- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4394 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4395 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4396 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4397 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4398 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4399
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004400- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4401 input.
4402
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004403New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004404-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004405
4406Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004408
4409Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004411
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004412- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4413 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4414 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4415
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004416- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4417 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4418 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004419 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004420
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004421 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4422 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4423 import signal
4424 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004425
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004426 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004427 while 1:
4428 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004429 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004430 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4431 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4432 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4433 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004434
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004435
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004436What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4437===========================
4438
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4440
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004441Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004443
4444- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4445 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4446 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4447
4448- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4449 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4450 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4451 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4452 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4453 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4454 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004455
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004456- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004457 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004458 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4459 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4460 associate a docstring with a property.
4461
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004462- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4463 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4464 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4465 other built-in object types.
4466
4467- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4468 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4469 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4470 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4471 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4472
4473- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4474 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4475
4476- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4477 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004478 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004479 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4480 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4481 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4482 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4483 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4484
4485- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4486 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4487 class.
4488
4489- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4490 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4491 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4492 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4493
4494- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4495 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4496 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4497 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4498
4499- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4500 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4501
4502- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4503 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4504 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4505 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4506 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004507 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004508 with the same value as s.
4509
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004510- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4511
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004512Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004514
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004515- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4516
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004517- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4518 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4519 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4520 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4521 objects.
4522
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004523- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4524 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004525 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4526 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4527
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004528- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4529 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4530 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4531
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004532Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004534
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004535- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4536 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4537 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4538 by the instances.
4539
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004540- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4541 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4542 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4543
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004544- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4545 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4546 before the entire comparison is complete.
4547
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004548- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4549 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4550 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4551
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004552- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4553 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4554 getwriter().
4555
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004556- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4557 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4558
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004559- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004560 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4561 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4562
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004563- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4564 iterable object.
4565
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004566- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4567 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004568
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004569- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4570 authentication.
4571
4572- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4573 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004574
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004575- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004576 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4577 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4578 a sample driver.)
4579
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004580Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004581-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004582
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004583- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4584 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4585 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4586 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4587 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4588 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4589 kernel has large file support.
4590
4591- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4592 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4593 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4594 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4595 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4596
4597- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4598 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4599 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4600
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004601C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004603
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004604- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4605 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4606
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004607New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004608-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004609
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004610- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4611 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4612
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004613Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004615
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004616- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4617 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4618 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4619 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4620 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4621
4622- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4623 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4624 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4625 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4626
4627- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4628 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4629
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004630Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004631-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004632
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004633- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004634 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4635 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004636
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004637
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004638What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4639===========================
4640
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4642
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004643Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004645
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004646- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4647 big to represent as a C double.
4648
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004649- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4650 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4651 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4652 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4653 restriction).
4654
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004655- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4656 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4657 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4658 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4659 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4660
4661 >>> dir([])
4662 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4663 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4664 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4665 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4666 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4667 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4668 'reverse', 'sort']
4669
4670 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4671
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004672- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004673 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4674 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4675 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4676 OverflowError exception.
4677
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004678- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004679 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004680 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4681 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4682 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4683 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4684 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004685 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4687 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4688
4689 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4690 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4691 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4692 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004693
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004694- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004695 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4696 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4697 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4698 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4699 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4700 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4701 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4702 once it is created.
4703
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004704- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4705 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4706 (key, value) pairs.
4707
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004708- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004709 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4710 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4711
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004712- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4713 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4714 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4715 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4716 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004717
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004718- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004719 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4720 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4721
4722 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4723
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004724- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004725 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4726
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004727Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004729
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004730- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004731 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4732 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004733
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004734- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4735 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4736 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4737 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4738 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4739 in this area anymore).
4740
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004741- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4742 threading.Timer.
4743
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004744- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4745 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4746
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004747- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004748 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4749
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004750- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004751 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4752 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4753 converted to Python longs.
4754
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004755- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004756 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4757
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004758- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4759 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4760 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4761
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004762Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004764
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004765- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4766 division operators as per PEP 238.
4767
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004768Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004769-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004770
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004771- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4772 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4773 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4774 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4775
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004776C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004777-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004778
4779- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004780
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004781- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4782 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004783 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004784
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004785 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4786 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004787 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004789
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004790- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004791 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4792 module:
4793
4794 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004795
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004796 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4797 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004798
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004799 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4800 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004801
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004802 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4803
4804 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4805
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004806- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004807 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4808 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4809 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004810
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004811New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004812-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004813
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004814- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4815 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4816 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4817 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4818 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004819
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004820Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004822
4823Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004824-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004825
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004826- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4827 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4828 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4829 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004830 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4831 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4832 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4833 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4834 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004835
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004836- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004837 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4838
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004839
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004840What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4841===========================
4842
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4844
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004845Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004846-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004847
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004848- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4849 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4850
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004851- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4852 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4853 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004854
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004855- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4856 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4857 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4858 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004859
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004860- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4861
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004862- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004863
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004864Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004865-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004866
4867- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004868 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004869 the module docstring for details.
4870
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004871Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004873
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004874- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004875 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4876 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4877 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004878
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004879- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4880 Nick Mathewson.
4881
4882Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004883----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004884
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004885- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4886 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4887 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4888 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4889 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4890 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4891 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4892 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4893
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004894- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4895 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4896 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4897 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4898
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004899- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4900 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4901 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4902 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4903 come a long way).
4904
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004905- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4906 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4907 write filters for these warnings).
4908
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004909- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4910 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4911 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4912 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4913 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4914
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004915- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4916 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4917 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4918 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4919 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4920 older distribution.
4921
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004922Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004923-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004924
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004925- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4926 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004927 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004928
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004929- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4930 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4931 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4932
4933- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4934
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004935- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4936
4937- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4938
4939- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4940
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004942
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004943- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4944
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004945New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004947
4948C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004950
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004951- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4952 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4953 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4954 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4955 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4956 against buffer overruns.
4957
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004958- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004959 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4960 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004961 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4962 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4963 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4964
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004965- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4966 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4967 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4968 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4969 deprecated.
4970
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004971Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004973
4974- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4975 relevant is found.
4976
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004977
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004978What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004979===========================
4980
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004981*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4982
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004983Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004984----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004985
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004986- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4987 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4988 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4989 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4990 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4991 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4992 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4993 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004994 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004995 repaired.
4996
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004997- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004998 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004999 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5000 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5001 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5002 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5003 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5004 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5005 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5006 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5007
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005008- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5009 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5010 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5011 leading BMO character).
5012
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005013- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5014 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5015 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5016
5017 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5018 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5019 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005020
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005021 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5022 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5023 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5024 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5025 for various simple to use conversions.
5026
5027 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5028 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5029
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005030 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5031 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5032 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5033 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5034 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5035 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5036 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5037 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5038 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5039 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5040 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5041 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5042 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5043 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5044 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005045
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005046- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5047 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5048 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005049 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005050 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005051
5052 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005053 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5054 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5055 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5056 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5057 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005058 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5059 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005060
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005061 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5062 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5063 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005064 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005065
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005066- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5067 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5068 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5069 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5070 floating arithmetic,
5071
5072 x = 9007199254740992.0
5073 print long(x)
5074
5075 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5076 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5077 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5078 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5079 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5080 functions are of good quality).
5081
5082 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5083 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5084 algorithms to break.
5085
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005086- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5087 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5088 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5089 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5090 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5091 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5092 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5093 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5094 order.
5095
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005096- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5097 operation along the most common code paths.
5098
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005099- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5100 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5101
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005102- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5103 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5104 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5105 {}.update(UserDict())
5106
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005107- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5108 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5109 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5110 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5111 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5112 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5113 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5114 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5115
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005116- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005117 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005119 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005120 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5121 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005122 join() method of strings
5123 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005124 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5125 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005127 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005128
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005129- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5130 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5131
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005132- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5133 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5134
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005135- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5136 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5137 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5138 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5139
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005140- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5141 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005142 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005143 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5144 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005145
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005146- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5147
5148
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005149Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005151
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005152- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005153 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005154 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5155 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5156
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005157- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5158 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5159
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005160- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5161 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5162 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5163 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5164
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005165- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5166 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5167 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5168
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005169- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5170
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005171- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5172
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005173- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5174 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5175 that are still imported into string.py).
5176
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005177- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5178
5179- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5180 Now it does.
5181
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005182- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5183
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005184- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5185 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5186 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5187 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5188 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005189 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5190 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005191
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005192- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5193 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5194 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5195 'help(object)'.
5196
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005197Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005198-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005199
5200- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005201 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005202 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5203 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5204
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005205- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005206 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5207 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005208
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005209C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005210-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005211
5212- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5213 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005214
5215----
5216
5217**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**