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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000015- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
16 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
17 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
18 freelist.
19
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000020- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
21 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
22
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000023- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
24 number.
25
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000026- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
27 a TypeError exception.
28
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000029Extension modules
30-----------------
31
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +000032- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
33
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000034- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
35
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000036- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
37
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +000038- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
39
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000040Library
41-------
42
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +000043- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
44 empty lists.
45
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +000046- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
47 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
48 and shelves.
49
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +000050- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
51 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
52
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +000053- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +000054 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
55 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +000056
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +000057- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
58 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
59 allow any iterable. Also the Set.update() has been deprecated because
60 it duplicates Set.union_update().
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +000061
Raymond Hettinger3081d592003-08-09 18:30:57 +000062- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
63 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
64 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
65
Raymond Hettingerb5a42082003-08-08 05:10:41 +000066- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
67 of raising a TypeError exception.
68
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +000069- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +000070 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
71 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
72
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +000073- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
74 and removed in Py2.4.
75
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000076Tools/Demos
77-----------
78
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +000079- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
80 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
81 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
82 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
83
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +000084- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
85
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +000086- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
87 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
88 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
89 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
90 now.
91
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000092- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
93 in effect
94
95- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
96 C-c C-h
97
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +000098- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
99 -d option was given.
100
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000101Build
102-----
103
104C API
105-----
106
107New platforms
108-------------
109
110Tests
111-----
112
113Windows
114-------
115
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000116- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
117 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
118 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
119
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000120Mac
121----
122
123
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000124What's New in Python 2.3 final?
125===============================
126
127*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
128
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000129IDLE
130----
131
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000132- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
133 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
134 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
135 context-menu actions.
136
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000137- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
138 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
139 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
140 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
141 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
142 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
143 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
144 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
145 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
146
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000147
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000148What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
149=============================================
150
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000151*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000152
153Core and builtins
154-----------------
155
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000156- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000157 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000158 comment at the end are still unsupported.
159
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000160Extension modules
161-----------------
162
163- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
164 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
165 than once. This has been fixed.
166
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000167- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
168 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
169 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
170 call.
171
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000172- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
173
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000174Library
175-------
176
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000177- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
178 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
179
180- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
181 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
182 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
183 restored.
184
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000185IDLE
186----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000187
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000188- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000189
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000190Build
191-----
192
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000193- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
194 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
195
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000196C API
197-----
198
199Windows
200-------
201
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000202- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
203 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
204
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000205- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
206
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000207Mac
208---
209
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000210- Various fixes to pimp.
211
212- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
213
214- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
215 more problems than it solves.
216
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000217
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000218What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
219=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000220
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000221*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
222
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000223Core and builtins
224-----------------
225
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000226- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
227 by sys.setcheckinterval().
228
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000229- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
230 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000231 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000232
233- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
234 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
235 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000236 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000237
238- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
239 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000240
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000241- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
242 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
243 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
244
245- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000246 770247.
247
248- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000249
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000250Extension modules
251-----------------
252
253- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
254 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
255
256- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
257
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000258- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
259
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000260- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
261 contained within the _strptime module.
262
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000263- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
264 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
265
266- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000267 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
268
269- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
270 the find_class attribute, if present.
271
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000272- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000273
274 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
275 (SF bug 763298).
276
277 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000278 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
279 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
280 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000281
282 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
283
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000284Library
285-------
286
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000287- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
288
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000289- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
290 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
291 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
292 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
293 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
294 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
295 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
296 or Tester().
297
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000298- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
299 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
300 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
301 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
302 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
303 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
304 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
305 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
306 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000307
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000308 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000309
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000310- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
311 weren't before was an oversight.
312
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000313- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
314 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
315
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000316- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
317 when there are no lines.
318
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000319- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
320 which could occur with Tk 8.4
321
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000322- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
323 to child processes.
324
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000325- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
326
327- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
328
329- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
330 xmlrpclib.
331
332- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
333 responses.
334
335- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
336 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
337
338- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
339 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
340 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
341
342- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
343 used as patterns.
344
345- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
346 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
347 than Tk 8.3.
348
349- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
350
351- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000352
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000353Tools/Demos
354-----------
355
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000356- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
357
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000358- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
359
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000360- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000361
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000362Build
363-----
364
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000365- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
366
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000367- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
368
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000369- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
370 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000371
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000372- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
373 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
374 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000375
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000376C API
377-----
378
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000379- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
380 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
381
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000382Windows
383-------
384
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000385- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
386 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
387 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
388 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
389 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
390 Python exception ::
391
392 thread.error: can't start new thread
393
394 is raised now.
395
396- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
397 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
398 instead of from DLL teardown.
399
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000400Mac
401---
402
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000403- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000404 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000405 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
406 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
407 the executable in the bundle.
408
409- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000410
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000411- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
412
413- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
414 on Panther.
415
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000416What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
417================================
418
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000419*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000420
421Core and builtins
422-----------------
423
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000424- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
425 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
426 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
427 with the -i option.
428
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000429- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
430 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
431
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000432- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
433 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
434
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000435- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
436 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
437 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
438 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
439 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
440 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
441 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
442 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
443 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
444 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
445 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
446 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
447 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000448
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000449- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
450 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
451 embedded in a lambda expression.
452
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000453- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
454 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
455 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
456 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
457 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
458
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000459- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
460 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
461 matches the restriction on classic classes.
462
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000463- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
464 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
465
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000466- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
467 It's writable again.
468
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000469- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
470 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
471 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000472 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000473
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000474- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
475 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
476 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
477
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000478Extension modules
479-----------------
480
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000481- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
482 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
483
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000484- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
485 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
486 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
487 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
488
489- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
490 collection.
491
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000492- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
493 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
494 unique within a single program run.
495
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000496- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
497 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
498
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000499- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
500 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
501
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000502- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
503 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000504
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000505- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
506
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000507- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
508 Fixes SF bug #730685.
509
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000510- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
511 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
512 for many BSD-derived systems.
513
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000514
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000515Library
516-------
517
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000518- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
519 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
520 primary ones:
521
522 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
523 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
524 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
525
526 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
527 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
528 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
529 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
530 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
531 framework features (which doctest lacks).
532
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000533- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
534 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
535 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
536 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
537 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
538 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
539 argument.
540
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000541- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
542 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
543 in the archive.
544
545- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
546 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
547
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000548- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
549 569574).
550
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000551- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
552 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
553 no more.
554
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000555- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
556 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
557 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
558 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
559 code coverage.
560
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000561- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
562 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
563 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000564 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
565 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000566
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000567- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
568 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
569 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000570 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000571
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000572- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
573
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000574- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
575 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
576 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
577 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
578
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000579- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
580 handling.
581
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000582- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
583 __doc__ of data descriptors.
584
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000585- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
586 in socket.py.
587
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000588- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
589
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000590- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
591 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
592 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
593 opener with proxy support.
594
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000595- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
596
597- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
598
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000599Tools/Demos
600-----------
601
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000602- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
603
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000604- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
605
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000606- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
607 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000608
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000609- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
610 files.
611
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000612Build
613-----
614
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000615- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000616 different root directory.
617
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000618C API
619-----
620
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000621- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
622 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
623 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
624 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
625 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
626 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
627 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
628 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
629 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
630 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
631
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000632- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
633 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
634 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
635 from Python.
636
637
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000638New platforms
639-------------
640
641None this time.
642
643Tests
644-----
645
646- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
647 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
648
649Windows
650-------
651
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000652- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
653
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000654- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
655 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
656 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
657 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
658 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
659 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
660 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
661 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
662 that's what it's for.
663
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000664Mac
665---
666
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000667- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
668 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
669 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
670 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000671- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
672 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
673- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000674
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000675SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
676------------------------------------
677
678430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
679598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
680622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
681661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
682683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
683697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
684713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
685724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
686727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
687729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
688730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
689731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
690732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
691733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
692735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
693740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
694744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
695745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
696747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
697749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
698751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
699753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
700755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
701757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
702760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
703
704
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000705What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
706================================
707
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000708*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000709
710Core and builtins
711-----------------
712
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000713- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
714 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
715
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000716- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
717 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
718 and cannot be strings).
719
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000720- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
721 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
722 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
723 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
724
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000725- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
726 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
727 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
728 Python itself.
729
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000730- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
731 the referenced object, if it has one.
732
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000733- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
734 the thread started at
735 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
736
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000737- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
738 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
739 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
740 placed on a list index.
741
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000742- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
743 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
744 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
745 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
746
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000747- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
748 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
749 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
750 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
751 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
752 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
753 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
754
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000755- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
756 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
757 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
758 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
759 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
760
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000761- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
762 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000763
764- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
765 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
766 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
767 #693195.)
768
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000769- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
770 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000771
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000772- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000773 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000774 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
775 interpreter executions, would fail.
776
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000777- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000778 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000779 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000780
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000781Extension modules
782-----------------
783
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000784- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
785 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
786 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
787 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
788
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000789- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
790 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
791
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000792- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
793 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
794 and Greg Chapman.)
795
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000796- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
797 recursively.
798
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000799- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000800 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
801 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
802 leaks.
803
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000804- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
805
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000806- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
807 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
808 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
809 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
810 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
811 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
812 #705836.
813
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000814- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000815 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
816
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000817- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
818 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
819 See SF bug #692416.
820
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000821- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
822 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
823
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000824- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
825 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
826 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000827
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000828- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000829 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
830 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
831
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000832- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
833 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
834 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
835 timeouts to work properly.
836
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000837Library
838-------
839
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000840- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
841 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
842 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
843 future release.
844
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000845- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
846 for querying platform dependent features.
847
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000848- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000849
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000850- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
851 pickle protocol versions.
852
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000853- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
854 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
855 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
856
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000857- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
858
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000859- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
860 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
861 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
862 modules.
863
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000864- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
865 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
866 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
867
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000868- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
869 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
870
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000871- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
872 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
873 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
874
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000875- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000876 MS Office extensions.
877
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000878- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
879 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
880
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000881- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
882 execution speed of expressions and statements.
883
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000884- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
885 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
886 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
887 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
888 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
889 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
890
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000891- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
892 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
893 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000894
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000895- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
896 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
897 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
898
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000899- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
900
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000901- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
902 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
903 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
904
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000905Tools/Demos
906-----------
907
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000908- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
909 See the module docstring for details.
910
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000911Build
912-----
913
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000914- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
915 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000916
917C API
918-----
919
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000920- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
921
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000922- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
923 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
924 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
925
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000926- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
927 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000928
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000929 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
930 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
931 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000932
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000933- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000934 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
935
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000936- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
937 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
938 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000939
940New platforms
941-------------
942
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000943None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000944
945Tests
946-----
947
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000948- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
949 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000950
951Windows
952-------
953
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000954- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
955 function.
956
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000957- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
958 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000959
960Mac
961---
962
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000963- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
964 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000965
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000966- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
967 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000968
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000969- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
970 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
971 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000972
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000973- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000974 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
975 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000976
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000977- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
978 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000979
980
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000981What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
982=================================
983
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000984*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000985
986Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000987-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000988
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000989- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
990 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
991 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
992
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000993- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
994 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
995 (SF patch #664376.)
996
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000997- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
998 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
999 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1000 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1001 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1002 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001003 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001004
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001005- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1006 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1007 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1008 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001009 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001010
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001011- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1012 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1013 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1014 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1015 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1016 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1017 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1018 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1019 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1020 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1021 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1022
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001023- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1024 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1025 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1026 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1027 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1028 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1029
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001030- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1031 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1032
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001033- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1034 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1035 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1036 case.)
1037
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001038- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1039 passed as unicode strings.
1040
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001041- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1042 See SF bug #683467.
1043
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001044- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1045 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1046
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001047- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1048
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001049- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1050
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001051- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1052 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1053 arguments.
1054
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001055- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1056 See SF bug #667147.
1057
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001058- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001059 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001060 See SF bug #676155.
1061
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001062- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001063 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001064 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1065 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1066 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1067 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1068 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1069 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001070
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001071Extension modules
1072-----------------
1073
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001074- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1075 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1076 tp_as_number pointer.
1077
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001078- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1079 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1080 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1081 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1082 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1083
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001084- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1085
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001086- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1087
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001088- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001089 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001090 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1091 patch #678531.)
1092
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001093- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1094 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1095
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001096- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1097 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1098
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001099- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1100
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001101- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1102 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1103 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1104
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001105- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1106
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001107- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1108 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1109
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001110- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001111
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001112- datetime changes:
1113
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001114 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1115
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001116 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1117 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1118 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1119 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1120 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1121 now.
1122
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001123 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001124 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1125 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001126
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001127 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001128 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001129 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1130 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1131 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1132 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001133
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001134 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1135 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1136 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001137 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1138
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001139 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1140 by a later example coded by Guido.
1141
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001142 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001143 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1144 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1145 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001146 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1147 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1148
1149 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1150 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1151 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1152 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1153 tzinfo subclass instance.
1154
1155 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1156 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1157 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1158 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1159 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1160 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1161 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1162 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001163
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001164 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1165 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1166 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1167 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1168 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001169 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1170
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001171 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001172
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001173 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1174 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1175 as a naive datetime object.
1176
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001177 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1178 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1179 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1180
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001181 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1182 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1183 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1184 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1185 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1186 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1187 comparison.
1188
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001189 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1190 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1191 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1192 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001193 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001194
1195 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001196
1197 and ::
1198
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001199 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1200
1201 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1202 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1203 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1204 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1205
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001206 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1207 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1208 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1209 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1210 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1211
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001212 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1213 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001214 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1215 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001216
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001217Library
1218-------
1219
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001220- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1221 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1222
1223- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1224 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1225 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1226 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1227 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1228 See PEP 307 for details.
1229
1230- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1231 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1232
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001233- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1234 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001235 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001236 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1237 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001238 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001239
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001240- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1241 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1242
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001243- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1244 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1245 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1246
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001247- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1248
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001249- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1250 exception.
1251
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001252- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1253 class.
1254
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001255- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1256 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1257 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1258
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001259- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1260 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1261
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001262- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001263 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1264 See SF bug #659228.
1265
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001266- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1267 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1268 See SF patch #651082.
1269
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001270- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001271
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001272- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1273 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1274
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001275- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001276 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001277
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001278- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1279 DOS paths from other platforms.
1280
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001281Tools/Demos
1282-----------
1283
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001284- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1285 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1286 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1287 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1288 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1289 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1290 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1291 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1292 example:
1293
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001294 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1295 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001296
1297 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1298
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001299
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001300Build
1301-----
1302
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001303- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1304 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1305 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001306 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1307
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001308 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1309
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001310- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1311 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1312 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1313 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1314 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1315 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1316 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1317 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1318 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1319
1320- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1321 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1322 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1323 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1324
1325- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1326 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1327
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001328C API
1329-----
1330
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001331- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1332 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001333
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001334- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1335 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1336 tp_as_number pointer.
1337
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001338- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1339 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1340 (SF #681367)
1341
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001342- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1343 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1344 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1345 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001346
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001347Tests
1348-----
1349
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001350- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001351 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1352 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1353 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1354 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1355 pydoc.)
1356
1357- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1358
1359- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001360
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001361Windows
1362-------
1363
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001364- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1365 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1366 time).
1367
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001368- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1369 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1370
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001371- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1372 release without strong cryptography.
1373
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001374- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001375 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001376
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001377- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1378 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1379
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001380Mac
1381---
1382
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001383- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1384 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001385
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001386- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1387 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1388 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001389
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001390- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1391 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001392
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001393- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1394 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1395 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1396 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001397
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001398- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001399 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1400 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1401 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001402
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001403
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001404What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001405=================================
1406
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001407*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001408
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001409Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001410--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001411
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001412- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1413
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001414- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1415 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001416 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001417 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001418 a different meaning than before.
1419
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001420- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001421 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001422 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001423
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001424- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001425 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001426 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001427
1428- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1429 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1430 and deallocation.
1431
1432- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1433 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1434
1435- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1436 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1437 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1438 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1439 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1440
1441- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1442 now detected by the garbage collector.
1443
1444- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1445 [SF bug 519621]
1446
1447- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1448 identifier.
1449
1450- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1451 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1452 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1453 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1454 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1455 [SF bug 563060]
1456
1457- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1458 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1459 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1460 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1461 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1462
1463- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1464 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1465 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1466
1467- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1468
1469- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1470 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1471 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1472 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1473 state of the slots would be lost.)
1474
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001475Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001476-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001477
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001478- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001479 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1480 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1481 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1482 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001483 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1484 Jython 2.1.
1485
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001486- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001487 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001488 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1489 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1490 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1491 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1492 these, see PEP 302.
1493
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001494- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1495 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1496 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1497
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001498- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1499 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1500 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1501
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001502- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1503 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1504 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1505
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001506- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1507 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1508 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1509 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1510 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1511 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1512 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1513 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1514 releases or implementations.
1515
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001516- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001517 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1518 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001519
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001520- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1521 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1522
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001523- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1524 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1525 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1526
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001527- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1528 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1529
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001530- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1531 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001532 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1533 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001534
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001535- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1536 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1537 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1538 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1539 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1540
1541 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1542 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1543 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1544 pattern.
1545
1546 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1547 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1548 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1549 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1550
1551 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1552 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1553 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1554 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1555 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1556 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1557
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001558- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1559 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1560 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1561 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1562 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1563 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1564 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1565 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001566
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001567- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1568 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1569 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1570 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1571 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001572 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1573 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1574 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1575 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1576 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1577 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1578 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001579
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001580- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1581 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1582
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001583- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1584 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1585 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1586 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1587 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1588 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1589 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1590 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1591 to Zack Weinberg!
1592
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001593- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1594 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1595 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1596 type. This has been fixed now.
1597
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001598- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1599 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1600 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1601
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001602- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1603 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1604 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1605 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1606 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1607 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1608 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1609 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001610 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001611
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001612- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1613 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1614 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001615
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001616- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1617 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1618 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1619 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1620 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1621 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1622 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1623 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001624 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001625 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1626 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1627
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001628- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1629 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1630 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1631 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1632 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1633 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1634 this.)
1635
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001636- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1637 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001638 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001639 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001640 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1641 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001642 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1643 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001644
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001645- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1646 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1647 currently running.
1648
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001649- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1650 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1651 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1652 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1653
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001654- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1655 as directory names.
1656
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001657- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1658 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1659
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001660- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1661 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1662
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001663- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001664 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1665 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001666
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001667- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1668 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1669 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1670 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1671 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1672
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001673- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1674 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1675 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1676 removed.
1677
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001678- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1679 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1680 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1681
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001682- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1683 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1684 to __debug__.
1685
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001686- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1687 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1688 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1689
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001690- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1691 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1692 deprecated now.
1693
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001694- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1695 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1696 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001697
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001698- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1699 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1700 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1701 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1702 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001703
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001704- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1705 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1706
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001707- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1708 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1709 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001710 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001711 is backward compatible.
1712
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001713- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1714 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1715 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1716 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1717 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1718
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001719- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1720 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1721 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1722 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1723 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1724 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001725
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001726- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1727 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1728
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001729- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1730 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1731
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001732- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1733 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1734 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1735 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1736 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1737
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001738- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1739 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1740 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1741
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001742- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001743 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1744
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001745- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1746 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1747 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001748
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001749- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1750 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1751
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001752- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1753 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1754 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1755
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001756- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1757
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001758Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001759-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001760
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001761- Added three operators to the operator module:
1762 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1763 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1764 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1765
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001766- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1767
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001768- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1769 archives.
1770
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001771- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1772 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1773 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1774
1775 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1776
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001777- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1778 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1779 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001780 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001781
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001782- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1783 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1784 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1785 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001786 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1787 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1788 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1789 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001790
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001791- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1792 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001793
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001794- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1795
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001796- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1797 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1798
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001799- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1800 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1801 supported.
1802
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001803- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1804
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001805- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1806 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001807
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001808- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1809 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1810
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001811- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1812
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001813- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1814 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1815
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001816- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1817 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1818 functions but callable type objects.
1819
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001820- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001821 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001822 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001823
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001824- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1825 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001826
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001827- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1828 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001829
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001830- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1831 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1832 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1833 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1834
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001835- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1836 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001837
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001838- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1839 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1840 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1841 and __imul__.
1842
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001843- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001844 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1845 is called.
1846
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001847- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1848 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1849 interpreter was compiled.
1850
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001851- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1852 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1853 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001854 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001855 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1856 1, not 2.
1857
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001858- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1859 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1860 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1861 limit.
1862
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001863- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1864 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1865 bug #623464.
1866
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001867- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1868 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1869 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1870 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1871
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001872Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001873-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001874
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001875- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1876
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001877- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1878 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1879 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1880 with Python 2.3a2.
1881
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001882- os.path exposes getctime.
1883
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001884- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001885 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001886 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001887 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001888 unit tests of floating point results.
1889
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001890- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1891 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1892 has been increased.
1893
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001894- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1895 executed.
1896
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001897- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1898 postinstallation script.
1899
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001900- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1901 test the current module.
1902
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001903- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001904 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1905 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1906 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1907 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1908
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001909- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001910 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001911 Ward's Optik package.
1912
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001913- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1914 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1915 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1916 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1917
1918- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1919 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001920 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001921
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001922- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1923 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1924 shelf are binary pickles.
1925
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001926- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1927 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1928
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001929- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1930 modules are iterators now.
1931
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001932- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1933 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1934 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1935 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1936 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1937 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001938
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001939- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1940 with their entity value.
1941
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001942- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1943
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001944- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1945 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001946
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001947- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1948 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001949 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001950
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001951- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1952 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1953 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1954 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1955 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1956 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1957 main():
1958
1959 import locale
1960 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1961
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001962- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1963 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1964
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001965- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1966 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1967 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1968 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1969 to the new standard.
1970
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001971- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1972 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1973 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1974 an extension to the database.
1975
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001976- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1977 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1978 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1979 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001980 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001981
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001982- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001983 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001984
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001985- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1986 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1987 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1988 bounded integers.
1989
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001990- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1991 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1992 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1993 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1994 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1995 in existence.
1996
1997 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1998 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1999 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2000 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2001 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2002 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2003
2004 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2005 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2006 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2007 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2008
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002009- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2010 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2011 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2012
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002013- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2014
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002015- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2016 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2017 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2018 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2019
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002020- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2021 argument.
2022
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002023- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2024 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2025 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2026 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2027 [SF patch 560794].
2028
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002029- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2030 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2031 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002032 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2033 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2034 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002035
2036- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2037 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002038
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002039- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2040 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2041 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2042 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002043
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002044- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2045 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2046 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2047 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2048 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2049
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002050- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002051
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002052- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2053
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002054- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2055 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2056 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2057 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2058 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2059 identical to None.
2060
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002061- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2062 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2063 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2064 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2065 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2066 results now.
2067
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002068- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2069 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2070
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002071- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2072 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2073 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2074 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2075 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2076 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2077 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2078 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2079
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002080- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2081
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002082- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2083 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2084
2085- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2086 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2087 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2088 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2089 and other systems.
2090
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002091- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2092 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2093 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2094 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 +00002095 work well with these.
2096
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002097- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2098
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002099- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002100 connections.
2101
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002102- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2103 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2104 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2105
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002106- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2107 sets
2108
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002109- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2110 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2111 name.
2112
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002113- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2114 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2115 passed in.
2116
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002117- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002118 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002119 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2120 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002121
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002122- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2123
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002124- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2125
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002126- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2127 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2128 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2129
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002130- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2131 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2132 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2133 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002134 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002135
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002136- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002137 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002138 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002139
2140- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2141 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2142 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2143
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002144- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002145 the value of its expression argument.
2146
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002147- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2148 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2149 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2150
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002151- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2152 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2153 skipstone browser was included.
2154
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002155- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2156 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2157
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002158Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002159-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002160
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002161- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2162 names in addition to accepting file names.
2163
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002164- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2165 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2166 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2167 still used and useful.)
2168
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002169- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2170 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2171 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2172 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002173
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002174- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2175 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2176 the generated binary.
2177
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002178Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002179-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002180
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002181- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2182
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002183- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2184 except in the hands of experts.
2185
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002186- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002187 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2188 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2189 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002190
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002191- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2192 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2193 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2194 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2195 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2196 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2197 builds.
2198
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002199- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2200 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2201 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2202 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2203 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2204 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2205 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2206 new type.
2207
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002208- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002209
2210 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2211 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2212 positive infinities.
2213
2214 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2215 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2216 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2217 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2218 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2219 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2220 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2221
2222 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2223
2224 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2225
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002226- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2227 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2228 size of the executable.
2229
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002230- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2231 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2232 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2233 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002234
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002235- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2236
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002237- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2238 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2239 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002240
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002241- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2242 well as Unix.
2243
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002244- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2245 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2246 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2247 modules in the README file for details.
2248
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002249C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002250-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002251
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002252- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2253 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002254 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002255 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002256 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002257
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002258- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2259 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2260 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2261 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2262 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2263 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002264 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002265 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2266 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2267 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2268 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2269 aligned.)
2270
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002271- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2272 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2273 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2274
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002275- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2276 level.
2277
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002278- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2279 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2280 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2281 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2282 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2283
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002284- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2285 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2286 code.
2287
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002288- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2289 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2290 adjusting for negative indices.
2291
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002292- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2293 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2294 object.
2295
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002296- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2297 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2298 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2299
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002300- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2301 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002302
2303- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2304
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002305- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2306 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2307 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2308 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2309
2310- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2311
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002312- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002313
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002314- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002315 without going through the buffer API.
2316
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002317- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002318
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002319- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2320 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2321 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2322 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2323
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002324- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2325 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2326
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002327- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002328 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2329
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002330New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002331-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002332
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002333- OpenVMS is now supported.
2334
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002335- AtheOS is now supported.
2336
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002337- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2338
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002339- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2340
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002341Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002342-----
2343
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002344- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2345 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2346 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002347
2348Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002349-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002350
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002351- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2352 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2353 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2354 bugs.
2355 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002356 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002357 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2358 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002359 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002360
2361- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002362 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002363
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002364- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2365 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2366
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002367- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2368 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002369 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002370 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2371
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002372- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2373 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2374 use files" uninstall option).
2375
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002376- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2377
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002378- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2379 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2380
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002381- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2382 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2383 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2384
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002385- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2386 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2387 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2388 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2389 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002390 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2391 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2392 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002393
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002394- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002395 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002396 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2397 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2398 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2399 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2400 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2401 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2402 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2403 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2404 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2405 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2406 work around.
2407
2408- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2409 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2410 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2411 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2412 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2413 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2414 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2415 specified with O_CREAT too).
2416
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002417Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002418----
2419
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002420- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002421
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002422- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2423 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2424 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2425
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002426- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2427 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2428 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2429
2430- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2431 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2432 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2433 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2434 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2435 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2436 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2437 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002438
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002439- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2440 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2441 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002442
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002443- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2444 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2445 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2446 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2447 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002448
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002449- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2450 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2451 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002452
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002453- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2454 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002455
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002456- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2457 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2458 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2459 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2460 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002461
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002462- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2463 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2464 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2465
2466- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2467 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2468 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002469
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002470- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2471 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2472 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2473 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002474 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002475
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002476- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2477 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002478
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002479- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2480 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002481
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002482- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002483 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002484 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2485 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002486
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002487
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002488What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002489===============================
2490
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002491*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2492
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002493Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002494--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002495
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002496- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2497 with a custom metaclass.
2498
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002499Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002500-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002501
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002502- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2503 are proxies.
2504
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002505Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002506-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002507
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002508- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2509 very short strings.
2510
2511- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2512 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2513 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2514 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2515 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2516
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002517Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002518-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002519
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002520- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2521 close or delete time).
2522
2523- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2524 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2525
2526- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2527
2528- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002529 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002530
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002531Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002532-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002533
2534Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002535-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002536
2537C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002538-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002539
2540New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002541-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002542
2543Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002544-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002545
2546Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002547-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002548
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002549- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2550
2551- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2552 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2553
2554- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2555 deleted at process exit time.
2556
2557- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2558 in backslash.
2559
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002560Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002561----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002562
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002563- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2564 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2565 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2566
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002567
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002568What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002569===========================
2570
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002571*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2572
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002573Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002574--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002575
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002576- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2577 been extensively updated. See
2578
2579 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2580
2581 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2582
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002583- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2584 deleted!
2585
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002586- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2587 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2588 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2589 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2590 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2591
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002592- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2593
2594 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2595 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2596
2597 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2598 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2599 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2600 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2601 supported anyway.
2602
2603 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2604 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2605
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002606- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2607 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2608 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2609 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2610 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002611
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002612- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2613 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2614 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2615
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002616Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002617-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002618
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002619- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2620 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2621 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2622 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2623 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2624 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002625 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2626 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2627 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2628 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002629
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002630- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2631 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2632 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2633
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002634Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002635-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002636
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002637- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2638
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002639Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002640-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002641
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002642- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2643 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2644 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2645 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2646 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2647 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2648
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002649- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2650
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002651- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2652
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002653- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2654
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002655- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2656 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2657 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2658
2659- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2660
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002661Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002662-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002663
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002664- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2665 off a search on Google.
2666
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002667Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002668-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002669
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002670- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2671 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2672 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2673 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2674 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2675 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2676 other platforms should do likewise.
2677
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002678- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2679 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2680 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2681
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002682C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002683-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002684
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002685- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2686 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2687 producing key-value pairs.
2688
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002689- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002690 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002691 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2692 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2693 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2694 previously went unchallenged.
2695
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002696New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002697-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002698
2699Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002700-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002701
2702Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002703-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002704
2705Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002706----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002707
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002708- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2709 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002710
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002711- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2712 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2713 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2714 home.
2715
2716
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002717What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002718===========================
2719
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002720*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2721
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002722Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002723--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002724
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002725- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2726 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002727
2728 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002729 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002730
2731 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2732 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002733 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002734 This needs to be documented.
2735
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002736- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2737 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2738
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002739- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2740 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2741 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2742
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002743- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2744 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2745
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002746- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2747 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2748 class forbids it).
2749
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002750- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2751 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2752 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2753
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002754- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2755
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002756Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002757-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002758
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002759- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2760 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002761 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002762
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002763- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2764 (like 1 + '').
2765
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002766Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002767-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002768
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002769- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2770 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2771 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2772 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002773 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002774 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2775
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002776- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2777 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2778 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2779 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2780
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002781- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2782 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002783 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2784 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2785 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002786
2787- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2788 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002789
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002790- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2791 bytes on its input.
2792
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002793Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002794-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002795
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002796- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002797 convenience function.
2798
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002799- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2800 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2801 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002802 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2803 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2804 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2805 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2806 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2807 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002808
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002809- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2810 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2811 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2812 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2813
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002814- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2815 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2816 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2817
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002818- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2819 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2820 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2821 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2822
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002823- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2824 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002825 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002826 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2827 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2828 new -l and -e options.
2829
2830- statcache is now deprecated.
2831
2832- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2833 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002834 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002835 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2836 time properly taken into account.
2837
2838- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2839 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2840 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2841 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2842
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002843Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002844-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002845
2846Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002847-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002848
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002849- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2850 is built with libdb3 if available.
2851
2852- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2853
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002854C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002855-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002856
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002857- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2858 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2859 PySequence_Size().
2860
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002861- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2862
2863- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2864 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2865 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2866
2867- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2868 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2869
2870- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2871 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2872
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002873New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002874-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002875
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002876- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2877 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2878
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002879- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2880 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2881
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002882- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2883
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002884Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002885-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002886
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002887- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2888 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2889
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002890Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002891-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002892
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002893Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002894----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002895
2896- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2897 removed completely in the next release.
2898
2899- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2900 OSX.
2901
2902- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2903 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2904
2905- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2906
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002907
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002908What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002909===========================
2910
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002911*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2912
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002913Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002914--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002915
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002916- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002917 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002918 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002919 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2920 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002921 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2922 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002923 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2924 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002925
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002926- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2927 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2928
2929- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2930 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2931
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002932Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002933-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002934
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002935- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2936 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2937 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2938 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2939 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2940 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2941 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2942 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2943
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002944- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2945 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2946 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2947 example).
2948
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002949- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002950 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002951 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002952 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002953
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002954- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2955 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2956 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002957 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002958
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002959- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2960 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2961 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2962 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2963 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2964 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2965
2966 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2967
2968 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2969
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002970Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002971-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002972
2973- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2974
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002975- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2976
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002977- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2978 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002979
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002980- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2981 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2982 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2983 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2984 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2985 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002986 attributes.
2987
2988- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2989 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2990 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002991
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002992- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2993 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2994 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002995
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002996- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2997 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2998 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002999 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3000 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3001
3002- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3003 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003004
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003005Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003006-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003007
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003008- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3009 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3010
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003011- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3012 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3013 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3014 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3015
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003016- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3017 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3018 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3019 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3020
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003021 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3022 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3023 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3024 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3025 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3026 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3027 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3028 without losing information).
3029
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003030- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003031 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3032 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3033 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3034 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3035 module).
3036
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003037 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003038 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3039 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3040 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3041 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003042
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003043- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003044 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3045 encoding.
3046
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003047- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3048 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3049
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003050- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003051 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3052
3053- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3054 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3055 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3056 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3057
3058- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3059
3060- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3061 ON, and OFF.
3062
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003063- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3064 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3065
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003066Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003067-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003068
3069- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3070 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3071 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003072
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003073- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3074 been added: -X and -E.
3075
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003076Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003077-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003078
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003079- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3080 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3081
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003082C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003083-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003084
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003085- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3086 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3087 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3088 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3089 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3090
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003091- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3092 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3093 as long) arguments.
3094
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003095- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3096 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3097 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3098 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3099 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3100 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3101
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003102- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3103 input.
3104
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003105New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003106-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003107
3108Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003109-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003110
3111Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003112-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003113
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003114- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3115 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3116 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3117
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003118- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3119 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3120 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003121 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003122
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003123 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3124 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3125 import signal
3126 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003127
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003128 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003129 while 1:
3130 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003132 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3133 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3134 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3135 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003136
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003137
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003138What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3139===========================
3140
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003141*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3142
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003143Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003144--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003145
3146- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3147 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3148 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3149
3150- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3151 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3152 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3153 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3154 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3155 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3156 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003157
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003158- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003159 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003160 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3161 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3162 associate a docstring with a property.
3163
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003164- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3165 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3166 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3167 other built-in object types.
3168
3169- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3170 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3171 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3172 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3173 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3174
3175- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3176 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3177
3178- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3179 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003180 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003181 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3182 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3183 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3184 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3185 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3186
3187- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3188 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3189 class.
3190
3191- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3192 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3193 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3194 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3195
3196- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3197 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3198 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3199 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3200
3201- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3202 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3203
3204- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3205 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3206 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3207 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3208 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003209 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003210 with the same value as s.
3211
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003212- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3213
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003214Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003216
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003217- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3218
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003219- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3220 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3221 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3222 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3223 objects.
3224
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003225- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3226 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003227 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3228 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3229
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003230- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3231 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3232 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3233
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003234Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003235-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003236
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003237- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3238 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3239 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3240 by the instances.
3241
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003242- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3243 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3244 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3245
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003246- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3247 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3248 before the entire comparison is complete.
3249
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003250- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3251 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3252 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3253
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003254- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3255 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3256 getwriter().
3257
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003258- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3259 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3260
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003261- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003262 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3263 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3264
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003265- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3266 iterable object.
3267
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003268- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3269 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003270
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003271- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3272 authentication.
3273
3274- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3275 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003276
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003277- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003278 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3279 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3280 a sample driver.)
3281
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003282Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003283-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003284
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003285- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3286 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3287 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3288 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3289 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3290 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3291 kernel has large file support.
3292
3293- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3294 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3295 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3296 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3297 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3298
3299- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3300 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3301 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3302
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003303C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003304-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003305
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003306- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3307 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3308
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003309New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003310-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003311
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003312- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3313 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3314
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003315Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003316-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003317
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003318- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3319 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3320 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3321 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3322 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3323
3324- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3325 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3326 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3327 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3328
3329- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3330 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3331
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003332Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003333-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003334
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003335- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003336 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3337 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003338
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003339
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003340What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3341===========================
3342
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3344
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003345Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003347
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003348- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3349 big to represent as a C double.
3350
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003351- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3352 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3353 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3354 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3355 restriction).
3356
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003357- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3358 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3359 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3360 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3361 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3362
3363 >>> dir([])
3364 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3365 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3366 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3367 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3368 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3369 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3370 'reverse', 'sort']
3371
3372 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3373
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003374- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003375 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3376 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3377 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3378 OverflowError exception.
3379
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003380- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003381 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003382 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3383 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3384 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3385 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3386 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003387 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003388 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3389 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3390
3391 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3392 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3393 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3394 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003395
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003396- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003397 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3398 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3399 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3400 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3401 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3402 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3403 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3404 once it is created.
3405
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003406- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3407 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3408 (key, value) pairs.
3409
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003410- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003411 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3412 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3413
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003414- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3415 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3416 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3417 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3418 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003419
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003420- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003421 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3422 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3423
3424 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3425
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003426- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003427 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3428
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003429Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003430-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003431
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003432- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003433 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3434 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003435
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003436- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3437 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3438 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3439 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3440 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3441 in this area anymore).
3442
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003443- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3444 threading.Timer.
3445
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003446- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3447 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3448
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003449- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003450 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3451
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003452- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003453 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3454 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3455 converted to Python longs.
3456
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003457- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003458 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3459
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003460- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3461 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3462 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3463
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003464Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003465-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003466
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003467- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3468 division operators as per PEP 238.
3469
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003470Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003471-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003472
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003473- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3474 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3475 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3476 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3477
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003478C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003480
3481- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003482
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003483- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3484 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003485 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003486
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3488 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003489 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003491
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003492- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003493 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3494 module:
3495
3496 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003497
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003498 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3499 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003500
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003501 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3502 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003503
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003504 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3505
3506 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3507
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003508- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003509 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3510 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3511 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003512
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003513New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003515
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003516- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3517 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3518 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3519 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3520 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003521
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003522Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003524
3525Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003527
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003528- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3529 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3530 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3531 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003532 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3533 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3534 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3535 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3536 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003537
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003538- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003539 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3540
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003541
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003542What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3543===========================
3544
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003545*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3546
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003547Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003548-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003549
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003550- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3551 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3552
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003553- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3554 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3555 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003556
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003557- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3558 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3559 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3560 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003561
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003562- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3563
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003564- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003565
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003566Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003567-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003568
3569- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003570 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003571 the module docstring for details.
3572
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003573Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003574-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003575
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003576- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003577 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3578 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3579 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003580
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003581- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3582 Nick Mathewson.
3583
3584Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003586
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003587- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3588 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3589 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3590 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3591 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3592 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3593 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3594 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3595
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003596- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3597 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3598 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3599 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3600
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003601- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3602 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3603 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3604 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3605 come a long way).
3606
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003607- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3608 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3609 write filters for these warnings).
3610
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003611- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3612 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3613 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3614 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3615 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3616
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003617- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3618 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3619 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3620 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3621 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3622 older distribution.
3623
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003624Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003626
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003627- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3628 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003629 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003630
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003631- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3632 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3633 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3634
3635- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3636
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003637- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3638
3639- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3640
3641- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003644
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003645- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3646
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003647New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003648-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003649
3650C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003651-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003652
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003653- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3654 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3655 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3656 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3657 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3658 against buffer overruns.
3659
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003660- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003661 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3662 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003663 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3664 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3665 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3666
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003667- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3668 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3669 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3670 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3671 deprecated.
3672
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003673Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003675
3676- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3677 relevant is found.
3678
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003679
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003680What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003681===========================
3682
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003683*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3684
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003685Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003686----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003687
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003688- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3689 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3690 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3691 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3692 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3693 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3694 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3695 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003696 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003697 repaired.
3698
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003699- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003700 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003701 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3702 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3703 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3704 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3705 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3706 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3707 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3708 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3709
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003710- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3711 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3712 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3713 leading BMO character).
3714
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003715- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3716 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3717 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3718
3719 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3720 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3721 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003722
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003723 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3724 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3725 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3726 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3727 for various simple to use conversions.
3728
3729 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3730 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3731
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3733 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3734 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3735 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3736 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3737 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3738 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3739 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3740 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3741 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3742 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3743 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3744 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3745 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3746 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003747
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003748- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3749 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3750 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003751 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003752 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003753
3754 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003755 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3756 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3757 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3758 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3759 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003760 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3761 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003762
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003763 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3764 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3765 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003766 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003767
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003768- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3769 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3770 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3771 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3772 floating arithmetic,
3773
3774 x = 9007199254740992.0
3775 print long(x)
3776
3777 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3778 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3779 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3780 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3781 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3782 functions are of good quality).
3783
3784 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3785 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3786 algorithms to break.
3787
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003788- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3789 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3790 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3791 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3792 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3793 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3794 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3795 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3796 order.
3797
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003798- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3799 operation along the most common code paths.
3800
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003801- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3802 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3803
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003804- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3805 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3806 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3807 {}.update(UserDict())
3808
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003809- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3810 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3811 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3812 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3813 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3814 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3815 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3816 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3817
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003818- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003819 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003820
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003821 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003822 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3823 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003824 join() method of strings
3825 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003826 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3827 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003829 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003830
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003831- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3832 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3833
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003834- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3835 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3836
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003837- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3838 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3839 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3840 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3841
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003842- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3843 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003844 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003845 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3846 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003847
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003848- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3849
3850
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003851Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003852-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003853
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003854- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003855 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003856 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3857 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3858
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003859- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3860 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3861
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003862- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3863 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3864 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3865 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3866
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003867- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3868 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3869 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3870
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003871- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3872
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003873- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3874
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003875- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3876 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3877 that are still imported into string.py).
3878
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003879- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3880
3881- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3882 Now it does.
3883
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003884- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3885
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003886- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3887 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3888 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3889 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3890 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003891 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3892 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003893
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003894- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3895 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3896 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3897 'help(object)'.
3898
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003899Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003901
3902- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003903 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003904 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3905 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3906
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003907- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003908 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3909 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003910
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003911C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003913
3914- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3915 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003916
3917----
3918
3919**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**