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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
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000015- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
16 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
17 be there.
18
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000019- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
20 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
21 the LC_NUMERIC category.
22
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000023- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
24 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
25 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
26
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000027- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
28
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000029- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
30 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
31 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000032
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000033- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
34 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
35
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000036- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
37
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000038- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
39 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
40
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000041- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
42
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000043- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
44
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000045- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
46 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
47
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000048- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
49 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
50 Fixes bug #858016 .
51
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000052- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
53 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
54 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
55
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000056- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
57 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
58 improves their performance (about 35%).
59
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000060- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
61 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
62 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
63
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000064- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
65 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
66 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
67 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
68
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000069- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
70 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
71 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
72 length is not known).
73
74- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
75 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000076 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
77 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000078 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
79
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000080- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
81 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
82
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000083- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
84 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
85 keyword arguments.
86
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000087- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
88 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
89 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
90
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000091- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
92 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
93 cases.
94
95- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
96 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
97 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
98 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
99 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
100 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
101 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
102 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
103 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
104 a release build.
105
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000106- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
107 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
108
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000109- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000110 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000111
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000112- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
113 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
114 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
115 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
116 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
117 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
118 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
119 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
120 destroyed.
121
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000122- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
123 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
124 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
125 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
126 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
127 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
128 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
129 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
130
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000131- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
132 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
133 character other than a space.
134
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000135- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
136 by the function object or by the method object, the function
137 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
138 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
139 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
140 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
141 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
142 attributes with the same name.
143
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000144- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
145 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
146 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
147 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
148 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
149 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
150 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
151 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
152 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
153 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
154 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
155 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
156 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
157 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000158
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000159- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
160 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
161 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
162 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
163 This has been repaired.
164
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000165- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
166
167- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
168
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000169- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
170 over a sequence.
171
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000172- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000173 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000174
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000175- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
176
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000177- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
178 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
179 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
180 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
181 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
182 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
183 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
184 records with equal keys is unchanged).
185
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000186- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
187 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
188 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
189
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000190- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
191 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
192 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
193 freelist.
194
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000195- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
196 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
197
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000198- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
199 number.
200
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000201- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
202 a TypeError exception.
203
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000204- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
205 820195.
206
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000207- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
208 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
209 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
210
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000211- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
212 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
213 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000214
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000215- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
216 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
217 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
218
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000219- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
220 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000221 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000222
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000223- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000224 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
225 the first call.
226
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000227
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000228Extension modules
229-----------------
230
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000231- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
232
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000233- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
234
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000235- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
236 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
237
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000238- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
239 fewer false positives.
240
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000241- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
242 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
243
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000244- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
245 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
246
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000247- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
248 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000249 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
250 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
251 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000252
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000253- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
254 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
255 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
256 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
257
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000258- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
259 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
260 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
261 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
262 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
263 #897625.
264
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000265- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
266 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
267
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000268- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
269 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
270 and pops on either side of the deque.
271
272- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
273 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
274
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000275- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
276 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
277 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
278 other functions that expect a function argument.
279
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000280- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
281
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000282- os.getsid was added.
283
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000284- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
285 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
286 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
287
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000288- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
289
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000290- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
291
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000292- readline.clear_history was added.
293
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000294- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
295
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000296- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
297
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000298- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
299
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000300- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
301
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000302- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
303
304- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
305
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000306- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
307
308- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
309
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000310- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
311 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
312 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
313
314- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
315 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
316 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
317 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
318 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
319 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
320 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
321
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000322- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
323 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
324 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
325 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000326
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000327- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
328 iterators from a single iterable.
329
330- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
331 of raising a TypeError exception.
332
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000333- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
334 as parameter.
335
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000336Library
337-------
338
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000339- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
340
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000341- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000342 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000343
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000344- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
345 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
346
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000347- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
348
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000349- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
350 on cygwin and mingw32.
351
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000352- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
353
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000354- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
355 module.
356
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000357- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
358 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
359 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
360
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000361- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
362 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
363 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
364
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000365- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
366
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000367- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
368
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000369- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
370 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
371
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000372- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
373 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
374 type pattern with the same value exists.
375
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000376- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
377 when run from the command prompt).
378
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000379- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
380 not taken into consideration when caching value.
381
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000382- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
383 default sort).
384
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000385- Added global runctx function to profile module
386
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000387- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
388
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000389- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
390
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000391- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
392
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000393- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
394 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
395 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
396 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
397 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
398 accordingly.
399
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000400- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
401 decoding standards.
402
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000403- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
404 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
405 called for all requests.
406
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000407- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
408 they are passed to the compiler.
409
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000410- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
411 indent, width and depth.
412
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000413- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
414 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
415
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000416- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
417 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
418
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000419- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
420
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000421- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
422
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000423- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
424
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000425- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
426 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
427
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000428- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000429 for better performance.
430
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000431- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000432
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000433- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
434 a string).
435
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000436- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
437
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000438- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
439
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000440- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
441
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000442- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
443
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000444- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
445 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
446 list of fieldnames.
447
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000448- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
449 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
450
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000451- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
452
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000453- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
454 empty lists.
455
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000456- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
457 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
458 and shelves.
459
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000460- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
461 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
462
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000463- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000464 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
465 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000466
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000467- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
468 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000469 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000470
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000471- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000472 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
473 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
474
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000475- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
476 and removed in Py2.4.
477
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000478- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
479
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000480- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
481
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000482Tools/Demos
483-----------
484
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000485- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
486 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
487
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000488- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
489
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000490- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
491 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
492 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
493 destination in situations where both files are given.
494
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000495- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
496 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
497 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
498 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
499
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000500- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
501
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000502- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
503 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
504 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
505 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
506 now.
507
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000508- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
509 in effect
510
511- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
512 C-c C-h
513
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000514- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
515 -d option was given.
516
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000517Build
518-----
519
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000520- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
521 --enable-profiling.
522
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000523- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
524 is configured --with-tsc.
525
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000526- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
527 on AMD64.
528
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000529- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
530 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
531
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000532- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
533 removed.
534
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000535- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
536 supported (see PEP 11).
537
538- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
539
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000540- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
541
542- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
543 (see PEP 11).
544
545- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
546 sizeof(char) must be 1.
547
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000548C API
549-----
550
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000551- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
552 generator objects.
553
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000554- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
555 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000556 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
557 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000558
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000559- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
560 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
561
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000562- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
563 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
564 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
565 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
566 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
567
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000568- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
569 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
570 about 10% faster.
571
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000572- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
573 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
574
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000575- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
576 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
577 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
578 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
579
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000580New platforms
581-------------
582
583Tests
584-----
585
586Windows
587-------
588
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000589- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
590 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
591 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
592 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
593
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000594- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
595 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
596 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
597
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000598Mac
599----
600
601
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000602What's New in Python 2.3 final?
603===============================
604
605*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
606
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000607IDLE
608----
609
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000610- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
611 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
612 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
613 context-menu actions.
614
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000615- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
616 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
617 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
618 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
619 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
620 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
621 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
622 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
623 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
624
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000625
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000626What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
627=============================================
628
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000629*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000630
631Core and builtins
632-----------------
633
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000634- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000635 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000636 comment at the end are still unsupported.
637
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000638Extension modules
639-----------------
640
641- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
642 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
643 than once. This has been fixed.
644
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000645- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
646 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
647 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
648 call.
649
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000650- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
651
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000652Library
653-------
654
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000655- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
656 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
657
658- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
659 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
660 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
661 restored.
662
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000663IDLE
664----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000665
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000666- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000667
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000668Build
669-----
670
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000671- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
672 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
673
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000674C API
675-----
676
677Windows
678-------
679
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000680- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
681 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
682
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000683- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
684
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000685Mac
686---
687
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000688- Various fixes to pimp.
689
690- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
691
692- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
693 more problems than it solves.
694
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000695
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000696What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
697=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000698
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000699*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
700
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000701Core and builtins
702-----------------
703
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000704- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
705 by sys.setcheckinterval().
706
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000707- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
708 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000709 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000710
711- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
712 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
713 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000714 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000715
716- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
717 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000718
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000719- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
720 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
721 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
722
723- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000724 770247.
725
726- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000727
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000728Extension modules
729-----------------
730
731- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
732 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
733
734- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
735
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000736- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
737
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000738- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
739 contained within the _strptime module.
740
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000741- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
742 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
743
744- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000745 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
746
747- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
748 the find_class attribute, if present.
749
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000750- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000751
752 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
753 (SF bug 763298).
754
755 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000756 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
757 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
758 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000759
760 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
761
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000762Library
763-------
764
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000765- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
766
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000767- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
768 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
769 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
770 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
771 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
772 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
773 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
774 or Tester().
775
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000776- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
777 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
778 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
779 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
780 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
781 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
782 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
783 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
784 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000785
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000786 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000787
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000788- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
789 weren't before was an oversight.
790
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000791- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
792 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
793
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000794- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
795 when there are no lines.
796
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000797- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
798 which could occur with Tk 8.4
799
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000800- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
801 to child processes.
802
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000803- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
804
805- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
806
807- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
808 xmlrpclib.
809
810- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
811 responses.
812
813- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
814 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
815
816- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
817 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
818 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
819
820- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
821 used as patterns.
822
823- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
824 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
825 than Tk 8.3.
826
827- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
828
829- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000830
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000831Tools/Demos
832-----------
833
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000834- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
835
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000836- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
837
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000838- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000839
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000840Build
841-----
842
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000843- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
844
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000845- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
846
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000847- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
848 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000849
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000850- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
851 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
852 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000853
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000854C API
855-----
856
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000857- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
858 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
859
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000860Windows
861-------
862
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000863- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
864 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
865 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
866 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
867 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
868 Python exception ::
869
870 thread.error: can't start new thread
871
872 is raised now.
873
874- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
875 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
876 instead of from DLL teardown.
877
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000878Mac
879---
880
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000881- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000882 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000883 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
884 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
885 the executable in the bundle.
886
887- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000888
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000889- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
890
891- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
892 on Panther.
893
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000894What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
895================================
896
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000897*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000898
899Core and builtins
900-----------------
901
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000902- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
903 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
904 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
905 with the -i option.
906
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000907- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
908 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
909
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000910- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
911 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
912
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000913- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
914 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
915 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
916 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
917 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
918 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
919 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
920 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
921 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
922 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
923 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
924 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
925 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000926
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000927- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
928 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
929 embedded in a lambda expression.
930
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000931- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
932 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
933 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
934 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
935 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
936
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000937- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
938 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
939 matches the restriction on classic classes.
940
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000941- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
942 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
943
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000944- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
945 It's writable again.
946
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000947- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
948 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
949 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000950 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000951
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000952- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
953 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
954 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
955
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000956Extension modules
957-----------------
958
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000959- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
960 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
961
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000962- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
963 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
964 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
965 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
966
967- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
968 collection.
969
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000970- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
971 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
972 unique within a single program run.
973
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000974- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
975 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
976
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000977- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
978 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
979
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000980- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
981 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000982
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000983- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
984
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000985- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
986 Fixes SF bug #730685.
987
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000988- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
989 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
990 for many BSD-derived systems.
991
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000992
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000993Library
994-------
995
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000996- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
997 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
998 primary ones:
999
1000 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1001 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1002 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1003
1004 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1005 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1006 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1007 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1008 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1009 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1010
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001011- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1012 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1013 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1014 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1015 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1016 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1017 argument.
1018
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001019- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1020 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1021 in the archive.
1022
1023- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1024 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1025
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001026- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1027 569574).
1028
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001029- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1030 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1031 no more.
1032
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001033- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1034 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1035 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1036 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1037 code coverage.
1038
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001039- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1040 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1041 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001042 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1043 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001044
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001045- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1046 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1047 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001048 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001049
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001050- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1051
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001052- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1053 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1054 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1055 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1056
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001057- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1058 handling.
1059
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001060- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1061 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1062
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001063- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1064 in socket.py.
1065
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001066- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1067
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001068- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1069 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1070 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1071 opener with proxy support.
1072
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001073- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1074
1075- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1076
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001077Tools/Demos
1078-----------
1079
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001080- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1081
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001082- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1083
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001084- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1085 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001086
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001087- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1088 files.
1089
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001090Build
1091-----
1092
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001093- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001094 different root directory.
1095
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001096C API
1097-----
1098
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001099- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1100 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1101 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1102 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1103 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1104 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1105 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1106 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1107 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1108 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1109
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001110- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1111 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1112 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1113 from Python.
1114
1115
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001116New platforms
1117-------------
1118
1119None this time.
1120
1121Tests
1122-----
1123
1124- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1125 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1126
1127Windows
1128-------
1129
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001130- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1131
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001132- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1133 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1134 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1135 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1136 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1137 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1138 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1139 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1140 that's what it's for.
1141
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001142Mac
1143---
1144
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001145- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1146 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1147 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1148 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001149- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1150 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1151- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001152
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001153SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1154------------------------------------
1155
1156430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1157598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1158622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1159661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1160683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1161697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1162713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1163724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1164727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1165729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1166730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1167731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1168732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1169733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1170735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1171740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1172744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1173745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1174747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1175749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1176751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1177753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1178755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1179757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1180760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1181
1182
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001183What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1184================================
1185
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001186*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001187
1188Core and builtins
1189-----------------
1190
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001191- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1192 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1193
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001194- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1195 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1196 and cannot be strings).
1197
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001198- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1199 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1200 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1201 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1202
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001203- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1204 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1205 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1206 Python itself.
1207
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001208- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1209 the referenced object, if it has one.
1210
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001211- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1212 the thread started at
1213 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1214
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001215- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1216 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1217 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1218 placed on a list index.
1219
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001220- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1221 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1222 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1223 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1224
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001225- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1226 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1227 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1228 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1229 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1230 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1231 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1232
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001233- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1234 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1235 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1236 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1237 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1238
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001239- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1240 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001241
1242- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1243 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1244 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1245 #693195.)
1246
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001247- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1248 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001249
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001250- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001251 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001252 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1253 interpreter executions, would fail.
1254
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001255- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001256 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001257 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001258
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001259Extension modules
1260-----------------
1261
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001262- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1263 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1264 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1265 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1266
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001267- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1268 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1269
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001270- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1271 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1272 and Greg Chapman.)
1273
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001274- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1275 recursively.
1276
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001277- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001278 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1279 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1280 leaks.
1281
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001282- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1283
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001284- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1285 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1286 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1287 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1288 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1289 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1290 #705836.
1291
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001292- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001293 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1294
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001295- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1296 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1297 See SF bug #692416.
1298
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001299- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1300 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1301
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001302- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1303 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1304 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001305
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001306- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001307 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1308 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1309
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001310- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1311 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1312 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1313 timeouts to work properly.
1314
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001315Library
1316-------
1317
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001318- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1319 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1320 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1321 future release.
1322
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001323- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1324 for querying platform dependent features.
1325
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001326- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001327
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001328- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1329 pickle protocol versions.
1330
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001331- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1332 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1333 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1334
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001335- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1336
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001337- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1338 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1339 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1340 modules.
1341
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001342- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1343 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1344 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1345
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001346- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1347 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1348
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001349- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1350 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1351 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1352
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001353- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001354 MS Office extensions.
1355
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001356- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1357 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1358
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001359- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1360 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1361
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001362- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1363 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1364 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1365 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1366 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1367 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1368
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001369- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1370 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1371 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001372
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001373- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1374 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1375 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1376
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001377- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1378
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001379- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1380 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1381 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1382
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001383Tools/Demos
1384-----------
1385
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001386- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1387 See the module docstring for details.
1388
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001389Build
1390-----
1391
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001392- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1393 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001394
1395C API
1396-----
1397
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001398- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1399
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001400- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1401 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1402 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1403
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001404- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1405 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001406
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001407 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1408 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1409 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001410
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001411- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001412 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1413
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001414- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1415 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1416 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001417
1418New platforms
1419-------------
1420
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001421None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001422
1423Tests
1424-----
1425
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001426- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1427 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001428
1429Windows
1430-------
1431
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001432- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1433 function.
1434
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001435- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1436 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001437
1438Mac
1439---
1440
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001441- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1442 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001443
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001444- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1445 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001446
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001447- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1448 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1449 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001450
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001451- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001452 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1453 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001454
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001455- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1456 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001457
1458
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001459What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1460=================================
1461
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001462*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001463
1464Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001465-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001466
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001467- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1468 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1469 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1470
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001471- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1472 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1473 (SF patch #664376.)
1474
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001475- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1476 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1477 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1478 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1479 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1480 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001481 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001482
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001483- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1484 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1485 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1486 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001487 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001488
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001489- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1490 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1491 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1492 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1493 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1494 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1495 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1496 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1497 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1498 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1499 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1500
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001501- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1502 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1503 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1504 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1505 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1506 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1507
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001508- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1509 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1510
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001511- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1512 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1513 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1514 case.)
1515
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001516- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1517 passed as unicode strings.
1518
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001519- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1520 See SF bug #683467.
1521
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001522- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1523 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1524
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001525- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1526
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001527- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1528
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001529- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1530 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1531 arguments.
1532
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001533- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1534 See SF bug #667147.
1535
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001536- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001537 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001538 See SF bug #676155.
1539
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001540- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001541 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001542 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1543 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1544 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1545 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1546 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1547 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001548
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001549Extension modules
1550-----------------
1551
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001552- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1553 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1554 tp_as_number pointer.
1555
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001556- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1557 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1558 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1559 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1560 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1561
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001562- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1563
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001564- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1565
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001566- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001567 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001568 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1569 patch #678531.)
1570
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001571- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1572 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1573
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001574- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1575 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1576
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001577- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1578
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001579- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1580 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1581 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1582
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001583- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1584
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001585- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1586 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1587
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001588- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001589
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001590- datetime changes:
1591
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001592 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1593
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001594 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1595 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1596 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1597 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1598 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1599 now.
1600
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001601 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001602 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1603 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001604
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001605 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001606 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001607 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1608 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1609 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1610 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001611
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001612 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1613 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1614 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001615 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1616
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001617 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1618 by a later example coded by Guido.
1619
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001620 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001621 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1622 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1623 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001624 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1625 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1626
1627 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1628 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1629 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1630 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1631 tzinfo subclass instance.
1632
1633 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1634 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1635 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1636 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1637 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1638 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1639 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1640 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001641
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001642 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1643 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1644 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1645 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1646 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001647 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1648
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001649 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001650
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001651 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1652 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1653 as a naive datetime object.
1654
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001655 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1656 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1657 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1658
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001659 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1660 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1661 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1662 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1663 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1664 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1665 comparison.
1666
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001667 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1668 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1669 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1670 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001671 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001672
1673 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001674
1675 and ::
1676
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001677 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1678
1679 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1680 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1681 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1682 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1683
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001684 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1685 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1686 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1687 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1688 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1689
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001690 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1691 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001692 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1693 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001694
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001695Library
1696-------
1697
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001698- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1699 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1700
1701- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1702 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1703 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1704 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1705 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1706 See PEP 307 for details.
1707
1708- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1709 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1710
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001711- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1712 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001713 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001714 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1715 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001716 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001717
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001718- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1719 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1720
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001721- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1722 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1723 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1724
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001725- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1726
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001727- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1728 exception.
1729
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001730- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1731 class.
1732
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001733- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1734 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1735 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1736
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001737- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1738 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1739
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001740- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001741 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1742 See SF bug #659228.
1743
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001744- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1745 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1746 See SF patch #651082.
1747
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001748- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001749
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001750- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1751 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1752
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001753- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001754 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001755
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001756- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1757 DOS paths from other platforms.
1758
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001759Tools/Demos
1760-----------
1761
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001762- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1763 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1764 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1765 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1766 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1767 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1768 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1769 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1770 example:
1771
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001772 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1773 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001774
1775 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1776
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001777
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001778Build
1779-----
1780
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001781- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1782 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1783 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001784 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1785
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001786 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1787
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001788- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1789 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1790 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1791 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1792 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1793 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1794 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1795 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1796 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1797
1798- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1799 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1800 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1801 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1802
1803- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1804 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1805
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001806C API
1807-----
1808
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001809- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1810 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001811
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001812- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1813 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1814 tp_as_number pointer.
1815
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001816- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1817 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1818 (SF #681367)
1819
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001820- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1821 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1822 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1823 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001824
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001825Tests
1826-----
1827
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001828- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001829 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1830 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1831 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1832 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1833 pydoc.)
1834
1835- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1836
1837- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001838
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001839Windows
1840-------
1841
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001842- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1843 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1844 time).
1845
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001846- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1847 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1848
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001849- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1850 release without strong cryptography.
1851
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001852- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001853 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001854
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001855- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1856 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1857
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001858Mac
1859---
1860
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001861- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1862 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001863
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001864- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1865 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1866 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001867
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001868- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1869 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001870
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001871- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1872 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1873 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1874 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001875
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001876- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001877 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1878 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1879 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001880
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001881
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001882What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001883=================================
1884
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001885*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001886
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001887Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001888--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001889
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001890- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1891
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001892- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1893 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001894 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001895 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001896 a different meaning than before.
1897
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001898- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001899 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001900 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001901
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001902- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001903 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001904 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001905
1906- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1907 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1908 and deallocation.
1909
1910- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1911 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1912
1913- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1914 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1915 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1916 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1917 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1918
1919- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1920 now detected by the garbage collector.
1921
1922- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1923 [SF bug 519621]
1924
1925- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1926 identifier.
1927
1928- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1929 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1930 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1931 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1932 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1933 [SF bug 563060]
1934
1935- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1936 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1937 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1938 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1939 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1940
1941- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1942 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1943 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1944
1945- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1946
1947- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1948 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1949 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1950 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1951 state of the slots would be lost.)
1952
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001953Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001954-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001955
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001956- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001957 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1958 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1959 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1960 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001961 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1962 Jython 2.1.
1963
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001964- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001965 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001966 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1967 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1968 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1969 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1970 these, see PEP 302.
1971
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001972- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1973 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1974 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1975
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001976- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1977 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1978 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1979
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001980- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1981 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1982 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1983
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001984- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1985 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1986 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1987 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1988 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1989 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1990 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1991 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1992 releases or implementations.
1993
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001994- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001995 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1996 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001997
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001998- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1999 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2000
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002001- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2002 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2003 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2004
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002005- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2006 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2007
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002008- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2009 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002010 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2011 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002012
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002013- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2014 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2015 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2016 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2017 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2018
2019 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2020 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2021 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2022 pattern.
2023
2024 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2025 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2026 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2027 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2028
2029 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2030 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2031 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2032 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2033 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2034 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2035
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002036- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2037 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2038 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2039 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2040 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2041 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2042 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2043 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002044
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002045- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2046 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2047 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2048 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2049 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002050 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2051 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2052 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2053 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2054 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2055 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2056 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002057
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002058- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2059 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2060
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002061- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2062 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2063 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2064 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2065 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2066 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2067 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2068 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2069 to Zack Weinberg!
2070
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002071- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2072 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2073 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2074 type. This has been fixed now.
2075
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002076- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2077 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2078 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2079
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002080- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2081 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2082 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2083 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2084 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2085 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2086 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2087 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002088 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002089
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002090- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2091 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2092 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002093
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002094- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2095 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2096 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2097 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2098 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2099 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2100 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2101 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002102 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002103 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2104 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2105
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002106- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2107 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2108 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2109 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2110 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2111 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2112 this.)
2113
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002114- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2115 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002116 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002117 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002118 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2119 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002120 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2121 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002122
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002123- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2124 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2125 currently running.
2126
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002127- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2128 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2129 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2130 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2131
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002132- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2133 as directory names.
2134
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002135- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2136 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2137
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002138- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2139 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2140
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002141- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002142 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2143 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002144
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002145- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2146 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2147 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2148 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2149 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2150
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002151- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2152 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2153 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2154 removed.
2155
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002156- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2157 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2158 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2159
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002160- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2161 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2162 to __debug__.
2163
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002164- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2165 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2166 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2167
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002168- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2169 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2170 deprecated now.
2171
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002172- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2173 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2174 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002175
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002176- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2177 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2178 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2179 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2180 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002181
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002182- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2183 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2184
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002185- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2186 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2187 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002188 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002189 is backward compatible.
2190
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002191- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2192 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2193 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2194 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2195 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2196
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002197- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2198 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2199 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2200 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2201 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2202 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002203
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002204- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2205 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2206
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002207- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2208 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2209
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002210- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2211 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2212 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2213 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2214 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2215
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002216- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2217 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2218 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2219
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002220- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002221 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2222
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002223- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2224 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2225 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002226
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002227- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2228 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2229
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002230- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2231 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2232 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2233
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002234- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2235
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002236Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002237-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002238
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002239- Added three operators to the operator module:
2240 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2241 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2242 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2243
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002244- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2245
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002246- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2247 archives.
2248
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002249- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2250 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2251 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2252
2253 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2254
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002255- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2256 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2257 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002258 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002259
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002260- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2261 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2262 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2263 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002264 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2265 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2266 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2267 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002268
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002269- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2270 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002271
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002272- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2273
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002274- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2275 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2276
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002277- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2278 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2279 supported.
2280
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002281- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2282
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002283- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2284 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002285
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002286- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2287 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2288
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002289- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2290
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002291- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2292 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2293
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002294- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2295 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2296 functions but callable type objects.
2297
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002298- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002299 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002300 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002301
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002302- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2303 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002304
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002305- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2306 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002307
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002308- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2309 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2310 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2311 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2312
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002313- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2314 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002315
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002316- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2317 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2318 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2319 and __imul__.
2320
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002321- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002322 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2323 is called.
2324
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002325- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2326 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2327 interpreter was compiled.
2328
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002329- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2330 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2331 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002332 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002333 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2334 1, not 2.
2335
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002336- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2337 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2338 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2339 limit.
2340
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002341- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2342 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2343 bug #623464.
2344
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002345- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2346 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2347 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2348 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2349
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002350Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002351-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002352
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002353- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2354
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002355- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2356 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2357 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2358 with Python 2.3a2.
2359
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002360- os.path exposes getctime.
2361
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002362- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002363 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002364 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002365 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002366 unit tests of floating point results.
2367
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002368- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2369 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2370 has been increased.
2371
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002372- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2373 executed.
2374
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002375- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2376 postinstallation script.
2377
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002378- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2379 test the current module.
2380
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002381- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002382 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2383 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2384 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2385 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2386
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002387- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002388 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002389 Ward's Optik package.
2390
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002391- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2392 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2393 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2394 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2395
2396- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2397 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002398 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002399
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002400- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2401 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2402 shelf are binary pickles.
2403
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002404- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2405 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2406
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002407- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2408 modules are iterators now.
2409
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002410- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2411 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2412 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2413 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2414 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2415 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002416
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002417- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2418 with their entity value.
2419
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002420- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2421
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002422- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2423 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002424
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002425- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2426 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002427 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002428
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002429- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2430 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2431 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2432 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2433 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2434 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2435 main():
2436
2437 import locale
2438 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2439
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002440- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2441 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2442
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002443- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2444 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2445 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2446 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2447 to the new standard.
2448
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002449- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2450 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2451 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2452 an extension to the database.
2453
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002454- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2455 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2456 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2457 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002458 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002459
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002460- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002461 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002462
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002463- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2464 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2465 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2466 bounded integers.
2467
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002468- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2469 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2470 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2471 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2472 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2473 in existence.
2474
2475 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2476 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2477 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2478 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2479 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2480 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2481
2482 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2483 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2484 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2485 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2486
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002487- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2488 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2489 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2490
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002491- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2492
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002493- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2494 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2495 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2496 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2497
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002498- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2499 argument.
2500
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002501- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2502 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2503 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2504 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2505 [SF patch 560794].
2506
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002507- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2508 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2509 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002510 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2511 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2512 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002513
2514- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2515 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002516
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002517- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2518 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2519 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2520 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002521
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002522- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2523 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2524 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2525 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2526 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2527
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002528- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002529
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002530- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2531
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002532- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2533 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2534 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2535 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2536 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2537 identical to None.
2538
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002539- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2540 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2541 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2542 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2543 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2544 results now.
2545
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002546- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2547 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2548
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002549- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2550 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2551 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2552 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2553 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2554 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2555 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2556 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2557
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002558- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2559
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002560- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2561 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2562
2563- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2564 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2565 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2566 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2567 and other systems.
2568
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002569- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2570 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2571 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2572 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 +00002573 work well with these.
2574
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002575- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2576
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002577- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002578 connections.
2579
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002580- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2581 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2582 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2583
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002584- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2585 sets
2586
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002587- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2588 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2589 name.
2590
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002591- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2592 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2593 passed in.
2594
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002595- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002596 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002597 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2598 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002599
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002600- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2601
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002602- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2603
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002604- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2605 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2606 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2607
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002608- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2609 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2610 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2611 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002612 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002613
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002614- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002615 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002616 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002617
2618- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2619 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2620 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2621
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002622- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002623 the value of its expression argument.
2624
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002625- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2626 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2627 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2628
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002629- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2630 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2631 skipstone browser was included.
2632
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002633- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2634 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2635
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002636Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002637-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002638
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002639- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2640 names in addition to accepting file names.
2641
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002642- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2643 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2644 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2645 still used and useful.)
2646
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002647- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2648 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2649 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2650 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002651
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002652- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2653 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2654 the generated binary.
2655
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002656Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002657-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002658
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002659- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2660
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002661- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2662 except in the hands of experts.
2663
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002664- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002665 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2666 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2667 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002668
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002669- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2670 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2671 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2672 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2673 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2674 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2675 builds.
2676
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002677- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2678 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2679 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2680 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2681 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2682 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2683 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2684 new type.
2685
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002686- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002687
2688 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2689 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2690 positive infinities.
2691
2692 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2693 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2694 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2695 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2696 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2697 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2698 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2699
2700 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2701
2702 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2703
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002704- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2705 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2706 size of the executable.
2707
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002708- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2709 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2710 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2711 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002712
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002713- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2714
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002715- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2716 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2717 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002718
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002719- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2720 well as Unix.
2721
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002722- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2723 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2724 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2725 modules in the README file for details.
2726
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002727C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002728-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002729
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002730- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2731 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002732 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002733 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002734 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002735
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002736- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2737 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2738 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2739 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2740 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2741 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002742 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002743 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2744 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2745 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2746 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2747 aligned.)
2748
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002749- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2750 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2751 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2752
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002753- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2754 level.
2755
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002756- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2757 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2758 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2759 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2760 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2761
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002762- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2763 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2764 code.
2765
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002766- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2767 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2768 adjusting for negative indices.
2769
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002770- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2771 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2772 object.
2773
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002774- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2775 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2776 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2777
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002778- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2779 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002780
2781- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2782
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002783- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2784 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2785 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2786 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2787
2788- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2789
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002790- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002791
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002792- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002793 without going through the buffer API.
2794
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002795- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002796
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002797- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2798 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2799 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2800 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2801
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002802- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2803 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2804
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002805- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002806 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2807
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002808New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002809-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002810
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002811- OpenVMS is now supported.
2812
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002813- AtheOS is now supported.
2814
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002815- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2816
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002817- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2818
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002819Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002820-----
2821
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002822- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2823 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2824 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002825
2826Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002827-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002828
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002829- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2830 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2831 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2832 bugs.
2833 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002834 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002835 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2836 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002837 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002838
2839- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002840 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002841
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002842- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2843 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2844
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002845- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2846 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002847 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002848 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2849
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002850- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2851 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2852 use files" uninstall option).
2853
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002854- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2855
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002856- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2857 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2858
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002859- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2860 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2861 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2862
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002863- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2864 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2865 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2866 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2867 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002868 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2869 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2870 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002871
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002872- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002873 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002874 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2875 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2876 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2877 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2878 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2879 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2880 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2881 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2882 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2883 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2884 work around.
2885
2886- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2887 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2888 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2889 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2890 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2891 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2892 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2893 specified with O_CREAT too).
2894
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002895Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002896----
2897
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002898- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002899
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002900- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2901 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2902 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2903
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002904- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2905 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2906 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2907
2908- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2909 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2910 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2911 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2912 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2913 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2914 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2915 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002916
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002917- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2918 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2919 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002920
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002921- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2922 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2923 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2924 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2925 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002926
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002927- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2928 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2929 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002930
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002931- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2932 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002933
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002934- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2935 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2936 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2937 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2938 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002939
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002940- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2941 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2942 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2943
2944- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2945 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2946 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002947
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002948- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2949 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2950 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2951 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002952 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002953
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002954- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2955 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002956
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002957- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2958 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002959
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002960- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002961 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002962 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2963 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002964
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002965
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002966What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002967===============================
2968
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002969*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2970
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002971Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002972--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002973
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002974- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2975 with a custom metaclass.
2976
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002977Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002978-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002979
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002980- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2981 are proxies.
2982
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002983Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002984-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002985
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002986- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2987 very short strings.
2988
2989- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2990 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2991 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2992 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2993 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2994
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002995Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002996-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002997
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002998- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2999 close or delete time).
3000
3001- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3002 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3003
3004- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3005
3006- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003007 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003008
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003009Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003011
3012Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003013-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003014
3015C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003016-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003017
3018New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003019-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003020
3021Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003022-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003023
3024Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003025-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003026
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003027- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3028
3029- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3030 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3031
3032- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3033 deleted at process exit time.
3034
3035- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3036 in backslash.
3037
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003038Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003039----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003040
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003041- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3042 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3043 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3044
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003045
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003046What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003047===========================
3048
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003049*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3050
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003051Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003052--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003053
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003054- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3055 been extensively updated. See
3056
3057 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3058
3059 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3060
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003061- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3062 deleted!
3063
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003064- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3065 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3066 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3067 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3068 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3069
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003070- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3071
3072 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3073 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3074
3075 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3076 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3077 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3078 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3079 supported anyway.
3080
3081 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3082 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3083
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003084- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3085 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3086 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3087 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3088 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003089
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003090- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3091 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3092 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3093
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003094Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003095-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003096
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003097- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3098 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3099 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3100 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3101 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3102 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003103 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3104 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3105 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3106 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003107
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003108- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3109 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3110 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3111
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003112Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003113-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003114
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003115- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3116
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003117Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003118-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003119
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003120- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3121 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3122 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3123 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3124 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3125 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3126
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003127- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3128
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003129- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3130
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003131- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3132
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003133- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3134 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3135 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3136
3137- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3138
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003139Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003141
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003142- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3143 off a search on Google.
3144
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003145Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003146-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003147
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003148- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3149 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3150 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3151 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3152 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3153 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3154 other platforms should do likewise.
3155
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003156- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3157 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3158 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3159
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003160C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003161-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003162
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003163- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3164 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3165 producing key-value pairs.
3166
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003167- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003168 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003169 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3170 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3171 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3172 previously went unchallenged.
3173
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003174New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003175-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003176
3177Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003178-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003179
3180Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003181-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003182
3183Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003184----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003185
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003186- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3187 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003188
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003189- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3190 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3191 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3192 home.
3193
3194
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003195What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003196===========================
3197
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003198*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3199
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003200Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003201--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003202
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003203- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3204 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003205
3206 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003207 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003208
3209 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3210 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003211 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003212 This needs to be documented.
3213
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003214- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3215 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3216
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003217- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3218 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3219 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3220
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003221- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3222 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3223
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003224- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3225 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3226 class forbids it).
3227
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003228- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3229 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3230 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3231
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003232- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3233
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003234Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003235-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003236
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003237- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3238 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003239 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003240
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003241- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3242 (like 1 + '').
3243
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003244Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003245-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003246
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003247- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3248 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3249 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3250 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003251 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003252 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3253
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003254- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3255 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3256 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3257 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3258
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003259- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3260 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003261 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3262 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3263 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003264
3265- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3266 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003267
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003268- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3269 bytes on its input.
3270
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003271Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003272-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003273
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003274- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003275 convenience function.
3276
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003277- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3278 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3279 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003280 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3281 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3282 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3283 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3284 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3285 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003286
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003287- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3288 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3289 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3290 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3291
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003292- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3293 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3294 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3295
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003296- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3297 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3298 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3299 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3300
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003301- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3302 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003304 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3305 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3306 new -l and -e options.
3307
3308- statcache is now deprecated.
3309
3310- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3311 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003313 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3314 time properly taken into account.
3315
3316- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3317 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3318 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3319 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3320
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003321Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003322-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003323
3324Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003325-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003326
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003327- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3328 is built with libdb3 if available.
3329
3330- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3331
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003332C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003333-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003334
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003335- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3336 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3337 PySequence_Size().
3338
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003339- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3340
3341- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3342 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3343 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3344
3345- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3346 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3347
3348- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3349 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3350
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003351New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003352-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003353
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003354- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3355 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3356
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003357- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3358 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3359
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003360- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3361
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003362Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003363-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003364
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003365- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3366 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3367
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003368Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003369-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003370
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003371Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003372----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003373
3374- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3375 removed completely in the next release.
3376
3377- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3378 OSX.
3379
3380- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3381 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3382
3383- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3384
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003385
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003386What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003387===========================
3388
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003389*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3390
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003391Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003392--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003393
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003394- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003395 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003396 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003397 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3398 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003399 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3400 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003401 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3402 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003403
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003404- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3405 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3406
3407- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3408 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3409
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003410Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003411-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003412
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003413- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3414 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3415 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3416 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3417 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3418 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3419 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3420 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3421
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003422- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3423 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3424 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3425 example).
3426
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003427- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003428 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003429 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003430 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003431
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003432- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3433 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3434 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003435 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003436
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003437- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3438 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3439 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3440 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3441 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3442 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3443
3444 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3445
3446 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3447
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003448Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003450
3451- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3452
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003453- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3454
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003455- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3456 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003457
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003458- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3459 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3460 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3461 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3462 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3463 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003464 attributes.
3465
3466- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3467 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3468 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003469
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003470- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3471 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3472 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003473
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003474- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3475 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3476 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003477 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3478 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3479
3480- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3481 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003482
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003483Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003484-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003485
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003486- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3487 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3488
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003489- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3490 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3491 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3492 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3493
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003494- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3495 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3496 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3497 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3498
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003499 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3500 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3501 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3502 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3503 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3504 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3505 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3506 without losing information).
3507
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003508- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003509 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3510 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3511 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3512 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3513 module).
3514
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003515 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003516 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3517 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3518 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3519 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003520
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003521- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003522 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3523 encoding.
3524
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003525- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3526 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3527
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003528- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003529 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3530
3531- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3532 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3533 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3534 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3535
3536- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3537
3538- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3539 ON, and OFF.
3540
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003541- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3542 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3543
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003544Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003545-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003546
3547- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3548 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3549 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003550
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003551- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3552 been added: -X and -E.
3553
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003554Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003556
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003557- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3558 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3559
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003560C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003561-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003562
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003563- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3564 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3565 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3566 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3567 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3568
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003569- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3570 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3571 as long) arguments.
3572
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003573- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3574 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3575 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3576 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3577 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3578 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3579
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003580- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3581 input.
3582
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003583New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003584-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003585
3586Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003587-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003588
3589Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003591
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003592- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3593 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3594 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3595
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003596- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3597 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3598 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003599 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003600
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3602 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3603 import signal
3604 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003605
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003606 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003607 while 1:
3608 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003609 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003610 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3611 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3612 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3613 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003614
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003615
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003616What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3617===========================
3618
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3620
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003621Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003622--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003623
3624- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3625 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3626 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3627
3628- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3629 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3630 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3631 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3632 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3633 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3634 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003635
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003636- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003637 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003638 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3639 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3640 associate a docstring with a property.
3641
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003642- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3643 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3644 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3645 other built-in object types.
3646
3647- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3648 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3649 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3650 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3651 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3652
3653- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3654 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3655
3656- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3657 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003658 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003659 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3660 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3661 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3662 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3663 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3664
3665- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3666 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3667 class.
3668
3669- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3670 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3671 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3672 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3673
3674- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3675 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3676 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3677 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3678
3679- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3680 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3681
3682- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3683 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3684 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3685 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3686 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003687 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003688 with the same value as s.
3689
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003690- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3691
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003692Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003693----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003694
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003695- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3696
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003697- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3698 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3699 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3700 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3701 objects.
3702
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003703- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3704 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003705 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3706 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3707
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003708- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3709 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3710 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3711
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003712Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003713-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003714
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003715- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3716 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3717 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3718 by the instances.
3719
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003720- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3721 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3722 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3723
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003724- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3725 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3726 before the entire comparison is complete.
3727
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003728- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3729 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3730 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3731
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003732- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3733 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3734 getwriter().
3735
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003736- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3737 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3738
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003739- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003740 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3741 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3742
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003743- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3744 iterable object.
3745
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003746- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3747 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003748
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003749- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3750 authentication.
3751
3752- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3753 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003754
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003755- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003756 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3757 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3758 a sample driver.)
3759
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003760Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003761-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003762
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003763- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3764 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3765 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3766 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3767 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3768 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3769 kernel has large file support.
3770
3771- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3772 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3773 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3774 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3775 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3776
3777- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3778 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3779 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3780
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003781C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003783
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003784- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3785 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3786
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003787New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003789
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003790- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3791 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3792
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003793Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003794-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003795
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003796- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3797 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3798 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3799 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3800 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3801
3802- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3803 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3804 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3805 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3806
3807- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3808 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3809
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003810Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003812
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003813- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003814 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3815 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003816
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003817
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003818What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3819===========================
3820
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003821*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3822
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003823Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003824----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003825
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003826- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3827 big to represent as a C double.
3828
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003829- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3830 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3831 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3832 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3833 restriction).
3834
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003835- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3836 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3837 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3838 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3839 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3840
3841 >>> dir([])
3842 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3843 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3844 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3845 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3846 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3847 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3848 'reverse', 'sort']
3849
3850 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3851
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003852- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003853 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3854 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3855 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3856 OverflowError exception.
3857
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003858- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003859 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003860 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3861 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3862 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3863 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3864 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003865 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3867 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3868
3869 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3870 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3871 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3872 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003873
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003874- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003875 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3876 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3877 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3878 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3879 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3880 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3881 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3882 once it is created.
3883
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003884- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3885 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3886 (key, value) pairs.
3887
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003888- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003889 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3890 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3891
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003892- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3893 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3894 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3895 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3896 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003897
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003898- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003899 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3900 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3901
3902 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3903
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003904- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003905 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3906
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003907Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003909
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003910- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003911 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3912 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003913
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003914- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3915 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3916 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3917 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3918 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3919 in this area anymore).
3920
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003921- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3922 threading.Timer.
3923
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003924- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3925 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3926
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003927- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003928 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3929
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003930- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003931 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3932 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3933 converted to Python longs.
3934
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003935- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003936 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3937
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003938- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3939 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3940 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3941
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003942Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003943-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003944
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003945- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3946 division operators as per PEP 238.
3947
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003948Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003949-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003950
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003951- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3952 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3953 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3954 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3955
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003956C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003958
3959- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003960
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003961- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3962 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003963 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003964
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003965 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3966 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003967 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003968 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003969
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003970- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003971 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3972 module:
3973
3974 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003975
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003976 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3977 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003978
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003979 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3980 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003981
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003982 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3983
3984 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3985
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003986- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003987 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3988 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3989 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003990
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003991New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003993
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003994- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3995 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3996 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3997 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3998 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003999
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004000Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004002
4003Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004005
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004006- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4007 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4008 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4009 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004010 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4011 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4012 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4013 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4014 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004015
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004016- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004017 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4018
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004019
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004020What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4021===========================
4022
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4024
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004025Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004027
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004028- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4029 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4030
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004031- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4032 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4033 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004034
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004035- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4036 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4037 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4038 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004039
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004040- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4041
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004042- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004043
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004044Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004045-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004046
4047- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004048 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004049 the module docstring for details.
4050
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004051Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004053
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004054- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004055 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4056 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4057 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004058
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004059- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4060 Nick Mathewson.
4061
4062Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004063----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004064
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004065- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4066 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4067 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4068 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4069 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4070 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4071 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4072 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4073
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004074- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4075 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4076 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4077 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4078
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004079- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4080 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4081 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4082 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4083 come a long way).
4084
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004085- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4086 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4087 write filters for these warnings).
4088
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004089- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4090 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4091 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4092 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4093 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4094
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004095- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4096 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4097 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4098 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4099 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4100 older distribution.
4101
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004102Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004104
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004105- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4106 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004107 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004108
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004109- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4110 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4111 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4112
4113- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4114
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004115- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4116
4117- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4118
4119- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4120
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004121- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004122
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004123- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4124
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004125New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004127
4128C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004130
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004131- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4132 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4133 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4134 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4135 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4136 against buffer overruns.
4137
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004138- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004139 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4140 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004141 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4142 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4143 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4144
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004145- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4146 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4147 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4148 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4149 deprecated.
4150
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004151Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004153
4154- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4155 relevant is found.
4156
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004157
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004158What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004159===========================
4160
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4162
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004163Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004165
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004166- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4167 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4168 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4169 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4170 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4171 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4172 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4173 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004174 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004175 repaired.
4176
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004177- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004178 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004179 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4180 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4181 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4182 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4183 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4184 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4185 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4186 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4187
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004188- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4189 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4190 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4191 leading BMO character).
4192
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004193- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4194 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4195 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4196
4197 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4198 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4199 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004200
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004201 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4202 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4203 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4204 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4205 for various simple to use conversions.
4206
4207 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4208 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4209
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004210 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4211 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4212 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4213 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4214 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4215 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4216 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4217 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4218 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4219 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4220 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4221 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4222 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4223 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4224 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004225
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004226- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4227 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4228 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004229 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004230 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004231
4232 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004233 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4234 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4235 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4236 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4237 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004238 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4239 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004240
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004241 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4242 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4243 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004244 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004245
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004246- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4247 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4248 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4249 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4250 floating arithmetic,
4251
4252 x = 9007199254740992.0
4253 print long(x)
4254
4255 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4256 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4257 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4258 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4259 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4260 functions are of good quality).
4261
4262 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4263 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4264 algorithms to break.
4265
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004266- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4267 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4268 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4269 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4270 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4271 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4272 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4273 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4274 order.
4275
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004276- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4277 operation along the most common code paths.
4278
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004279- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4280 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4281
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004282- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4283 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4284 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4285 {}.update(UserDict())
4286
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004287- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4288 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4289 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4290 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4291 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4292 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4293 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4294 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4295
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004296- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004297 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004299 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004300 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4301 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004302 join() method of strings
4303 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004304 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4305 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004307 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004308
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004309- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4310 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4311
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004312- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4313 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4314
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004315- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4316 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4317 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4318 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4319
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004320- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4321 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004322 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004323 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4324 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004325
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004326- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4327
4328
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004329Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004330-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004331
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004332- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004333 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004334 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4335 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4336
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004337- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4338 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4339
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004340- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4341 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4342 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4343 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4344
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004345- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4346 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4347 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4348
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004349- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4350
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004351- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4352
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004353- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4354 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4355 that are still imported into string.py).
4356
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004357- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4358
4359- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4360 Now it does.
4361
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004362- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4363
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004364- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4365 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4366 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4367 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4368 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004369 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4370 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004371
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004372- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4373 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4374 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4375 'help(object)'.
4376
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004377Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004379
4380- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004381 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004382 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4383 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4384
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004385- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004386 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4387 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004388
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004389C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004390-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004391
4392- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4393 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394
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4396
4397**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**