blob: a41b616415882adb7e72c6c2257372d584b0b8e2 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000013- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
14
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000015- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
16 returning None.
17
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000018- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
19 ('\') with a specific error message.
20
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000021- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
22
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000023- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
24 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
25
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000026- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000027 an ferror() call.
28
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000029- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
30 list.sort().
31
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000032- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
33 (2+3) --> (5).
34
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000035- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
36
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000037- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
38 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000039
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000040- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
41 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
42 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
43
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000044Extension Modules
45-----------------
46
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000047- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
48 file size.
49
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000050- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
51
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000052- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
53 {remove_history,replace_history}
54
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000055- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
56 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000057
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000058- stat_float_times is now True.
59
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000060- array.array objects are now picklable.
61
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000062- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
63 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
64
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000065- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
66 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
67 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
68
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000069- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
70 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000071
72Library
73-------
74
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +000075- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
76 to build.
77
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +000078- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
79 symbolic links on Windows.
80
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +000081- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
82 profile.py if available.
83
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +000084- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
85
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +000086- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
87 in LWPCookieJar.
88
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +000089- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
90
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +000091- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
92
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +000093- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
94
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +000095- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
96
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +000097- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
98
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +000099- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
100
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000101- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
102
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000103- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
104
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000105- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
106 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
107 be exploited in various ways.
108
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000109- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
110
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000111- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
112
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000113- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
114
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000115- Enhancements to the csv module:
116
117 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
118 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
119 PEP 305.
120 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
121 reporting.
122 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
123 dictates.
124 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000125 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000126 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000127 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
128 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000129 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
130 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000131 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000132 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
133 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
134 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
135 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
136 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
137 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
138 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
139 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
140 without first creating a dialect class.
141 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
142 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
143 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000144 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000145 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
146 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000147 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
148 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
149 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
150 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000151 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
152 This has been fixed.
153
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000154- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
155 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
156 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
157 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
158
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000159- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
160
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000161- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
162 (Bug #951915).
163
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000164- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
165 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
166 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
167 encoding alias table
168
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000169- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
170
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000171- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
172 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
173
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000174- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
175
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000176- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
177
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000178- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
179
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000180- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
181
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000182- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
183
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000184- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
185 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
186 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
187
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000188- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000189 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000190
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000191- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
192 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
193 tokenizer with very long source lines.
194
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000195- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
196 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
197
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000198- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
199 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000200
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000201- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
202 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
203
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000204Build
205-----
206
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000207- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
208 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
209
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000210- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
211 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
212 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
213 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
214 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
215 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
216 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
217 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
218
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000219- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
220 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
221 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
222 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
223
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000224
225C API
226-----
227
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000228- Removed PyRange_New().
229
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000230
231Tests
232-----
233
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000234- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000235
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000236
237Documentation
238-------------
239
240- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
241 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
242 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
243
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000244Mac
245---
246
247
248
249Tools/Demos
250-----------
251
252
253
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000254What's New in Python 2.4 final?
255===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000256
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000257*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000258
259Core and builtins
260-----------------
261
262- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
263 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
264 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
265
266
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000267What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
268==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000269
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000270*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000271
272Core and builtins
273-----------------
274
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000275- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
276 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
277 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
278
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000279
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000280Library
281-------
282
283- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
284 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
285 raised is re-raised.
286
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000287- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
288 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
289
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000290- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
291 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
292 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
293 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
294 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
295 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
296 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
297 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
298 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
299 by the slice are recomputed now.
300
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000301- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000302
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000303Build
304-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000305
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000306- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
307 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
308 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000309
310C API
311-----
312
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000313- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
314
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000315
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000316What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
317================================
318
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000319*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000320
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000321License
322-------
323
324The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
325is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
326changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
327Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
328intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
329durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
330the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
331License::
332
333 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
334
335says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
336to Python 2.1.1.
337
338The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
339License Version 2.
340
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000341Core and builtins
342-----------------
343
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000344- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
345 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
346 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
347 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
348 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
349 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
350 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
351 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
352 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
353 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
354
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000355- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000356
357Extension Modules
358-----------------
359
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000360- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
361 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
362 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
363 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000364
365Library
366-------
367
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000368- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
369 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
370 returned.
371
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000372- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
373
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000374- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
375 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
376
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000377- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
378
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000379- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
380 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000381
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000382- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
383
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000384- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
385
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000386- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000387 the source code is updated and reloaded.
388
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000389Build
390-----
391
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000392- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000393
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000394What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
395================================
396
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000397*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000398
399Core and builtins
400-----------------
401
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000402- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000403 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
404
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000405- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
406 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
407 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
408 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
409
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000410- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
411 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
412
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000413- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
414 constant.
415
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000416- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
417 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
418 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
419 large), and to anomalies such as
420 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
421 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
422 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
423 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000424
425Extension modules
426-----------------
427
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000428- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
429 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000430 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
431 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
432 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000433
434Library
435-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000436
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000437- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000438 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000439 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
440 --swig-cpp.
441
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000442- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
443 it is set.
444
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000445- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000446
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000447- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
448 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
449 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
450 Closes bug #1039270.
451
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000452- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000453
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000454 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000455 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
456 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
457 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
458 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
459 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
460 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
461 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
462 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
463 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
464 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
465 + Updates to documentation.
466
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000467- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
468 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
469 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
470 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
471
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000472- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000473
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000474- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
475 applications should use the getmember function.
476
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000477- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
478
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000479- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
480 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
481 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
482 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
483 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
484 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
485 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
486 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
487 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
488
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000489- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
490 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000491 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000492
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000493- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
494 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
495 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
496 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
497 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
498 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
499 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
500 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000501
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000502- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
503 the new public features (of which there are many).
504
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000505- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000506 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
507 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
508 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
509 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000510 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000511
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000512- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
513
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000514- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
515 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
516 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
517 options.
518
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000519- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
520 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
521 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
522 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
523 conditions under which non-string values work.
524
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000525Build
526-----
527
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000528- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
529 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
530 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
531
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000532- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
533 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
534 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
535 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
536 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000537
538C API
539-----
540
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000541- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
542 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
543
544- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
545
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000546- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
547 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
548 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
549 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
550 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
551 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
552 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
553 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
554 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
555
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000556- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
557
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000558- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
559 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
560 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000561
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000562Tests
563-----
564
565- test__locale ported to unittest
566
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000567Mac
568---
569
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000570- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
571 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
572 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000573
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000574Tools/Demos
575-----------
576
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000577- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
578 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
579 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
580 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
581 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000582
583
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000584What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
585=================================
586
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000587*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000588
589Core and builtins
590-----------------
591
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000592- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000593 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
594
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000595- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
596 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
597 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
598 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
599 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
600 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
601 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
602 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000603 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
604 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
605 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
606 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
607 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000608
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000609- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
610 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
611 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
612 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
613 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
614
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000615- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
616
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000617- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
618 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
619
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000620- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
621 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
622 modified the list.
623
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000624- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
625 functions is now writable.
626
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000627- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
628 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
629 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
630 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
631
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000632- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
633 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
634 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
635 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
636 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000637
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000638- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
639 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
640
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000641Extension modules
642-----------------
643
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000644- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
645
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000646- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
647 data.
648
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000649- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
650 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
651 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
652 supposed to have been truncated away.
653
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000654- Added socket.socketpair().
655
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000656- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
657 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
658
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000659- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000660 versions of Python, have now been removed.
661
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000662Library
663-------
664
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000665- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000666 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000667
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000668- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
669 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
670
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000671- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
672 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
673
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000674- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
675
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000676- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
677 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000678
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000679- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
680 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
681
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000682- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
683
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000684- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
685
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000686- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
687
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000688- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
689 Percivall.
690
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000691- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
692 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
693
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000694- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
695 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
696 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000697 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000698
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000699- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
700 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
701 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
702 and exponent.
703
704- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
705
706- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
707 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
708 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
709
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000710- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
711 to the readline module.
712
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000713- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000714 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
715 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000716
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000717- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
718 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
719 contains symlinks.
720
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000721- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
722 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
723
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000724- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
725 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
726 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
727
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000728- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
729 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
730 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
731 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
732 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
733 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
734 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
735 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
736 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
737 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
738 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
739 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
740 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
741
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000742- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
743
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000744Tools/Demos
745-----------
746
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000747- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
748 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
749
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000750- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
751
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000752Build
753-----
754
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000755- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
756 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
757 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
758 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
759 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
760 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
761 plans to do so.
762
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000763- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
764 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
765
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000766- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
767 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
768
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000769- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
770 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
771
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000772- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
773 GNU/k*BSD systems.
774
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000775- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
776 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
777
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000778C API
779-----
780
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000781..
782
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000783Documentation
784-------------
785
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000786- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
787 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
788
789- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
790 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
791 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000792
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000793New platforms
794-------------
795
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000796- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
797
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000798Tests
799-----
800
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000801..
802
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000803Windows
804-------
805
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000806- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
807 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
808 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
809 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
810 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
811 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
812 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
813 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
814 the problem.
815
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000816Mac
817---
818
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000819..
820
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000821
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000822What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
823=================================
824
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000825*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000826
827Core and builtins
828-----------------
829
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000830- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
831 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
832 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
833 sensitive code.
834
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000835- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000836 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000837
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000838 @staticmethod
839 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000840
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000841 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000842
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000843- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
844 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
845 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
846 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
847 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
848 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
849 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
850 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
851 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
852 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
853 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
854
855 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
856 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
857 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
858 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
859 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
860 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
861 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
862
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000863- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
864 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
865
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000866- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000867 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000868
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000869- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000870 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000871 which was missing for no apparent reason.
872
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000873- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000874 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
875 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
876
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000877- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
878 types that support garbage collection.
879
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000880- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
881
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000882- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
883 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
884 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
885 Jython.
886
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000887- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
888
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000889- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
890 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
891
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000892- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
893 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
894 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000895
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000896- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
897 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
898 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
899
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000900Extension modules
901-----------------
902
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000903- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
904
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000905Library
906-------
907
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000908- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
909 TIS-620
910
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000911- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
912 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
913 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
914 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
915 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
916 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
917 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
918 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
919 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
920 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
921
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000922- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
923
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000924- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
925 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
926 same as when the argument is omitted).
927 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
928
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000929- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
930
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000931- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
932 schemes are offered.
933
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000934- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
935
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000936- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
937 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
938 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
939
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000940- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
941
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000942- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
943 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
944
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000945- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
946 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
947 when dummy_threading is being used.
948
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000949- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
950 from a tarfile.
951
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000952- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000953 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000954
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000955- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
956 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
957 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
958 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
959
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000960- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
961 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
962
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000963- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
964 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
965 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
966 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
967 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
968 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
969 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
970 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
971 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
972 by some other method in progress).
973
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000974- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
975 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
976 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000977
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000978- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
979
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000980- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
981 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
982 AM Kuchling.
983
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000984- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
985 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
986 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
987
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000988- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
989 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
990 instead of unsigned.
991
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000992- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000993 no longer part of the public API.
994
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000995- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
996 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
997 string methods of the same name).
998
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000999- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001000 SF patch 945642.
1001
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001002- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1003
1004 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1005
1006 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1007 DocTestSuites.
1008
1009- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1010 that provide thread-local data.
1011
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001012- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1013 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1014
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001015- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1016
1017- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1018 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1019 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1020
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001021- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1022
1023 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1024 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1025 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001026
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001027 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1028 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1029 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1030 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1031
1032 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1033 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1034
1035 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1036 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1037 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1038 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1039
1040 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1041 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1042 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1043 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1044 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1045
1046 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1047 wrapping help output.
1048
1049 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1050 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1051 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001052
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001053C API
1054-----
1055
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001056- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1057 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1058 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1059 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1060 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1061 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1062 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1063 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1064 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1065 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1066 its visible semantics have not changed.
1067
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001068- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1069 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1070
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001071Documentation
1072-------------
1073
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001074- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001075
1076 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001077 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001078
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001079 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001080
1081 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1082
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001083- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001084
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001085Tests
1086-----
1087
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001088- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001089 platforms that use the Makefile.
1090
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001091- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1092 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1093 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1094
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001095
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001096What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1097=================================
1098
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001099*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001100
1101Core and builtins
1102-----------------
1103
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001104- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1105 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1106 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1107 objects now (one object instead of three).
1108
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001109- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1110 Windows DLLs.
1111
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001112- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1113 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001114
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001115- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1116 a new .pyc magic.
1117
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001118- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1119 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1120 be there.
1121
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001122- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1123 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1124 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1125
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001126- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1127 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1128 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1129
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001130- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1131
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001132- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1133 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1134 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001135
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001136- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1137 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1138
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001139- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1140
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001141- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001142 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001143
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001144- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1145
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001146- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1147
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001148- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1149 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1150
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001151- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1152 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1153 Fixes bug #858016 .
1154
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001155- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1156 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1157 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1158
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001159- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1160 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1161 improves their performance (about 35%).
1162
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001163- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1164 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1165 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1166
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001167- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1168 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1169 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1170 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1171
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001172- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1173 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1174 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1175 length is not known).
1176
1177- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1178 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001179 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1180 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001181 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1182
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001183- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1184 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1185
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001186- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1187 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1188 keyword arguments.
1189
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001190- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1191 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1192 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1193
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001194- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1195 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1196 cases.
1197
1198- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1199 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1200 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1201 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1202 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1203 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1204 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1205 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1206 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1207 a release build.
1208
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001209- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1210 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1211
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001212- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001213 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001214
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001215- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1216 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1217 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1218 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1219 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1220 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1221 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1222 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1223 destroyed.
1224
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001225- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1226 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1227 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1228 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1229 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1230 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1231 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1232 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1233
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001234- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1235 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1236 character other than a space.
1237
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001238- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1239 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1240 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1241 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1242 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1243 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1244 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1245 attributes with the same name.
1246
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001247- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1248 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1249 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1250 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1251 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1252 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1253 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1254 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1255 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1256 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1257 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1258 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1259 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1260 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001261
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001262- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1263 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1264 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1265 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1266 This has been repaired.
1267
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001268- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1269
1270- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1271
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001272- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1273 over a sequence.
1274
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001275- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001276 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001277
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001278- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1279
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001280- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1281 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1282 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1283 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1284 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1285 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1286 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1287 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1288
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001289- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1290 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1291 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1292
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001293- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1294 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1295 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1296 freelist.
1297
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001298- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1299 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1300
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001301- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1302 number.
1303
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001304- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1305 a TypeError exception.
1306
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001307- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1308 820195.
1309
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001310- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1311 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1312 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1313
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001314- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001315 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1316 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001317
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001318- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1319 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1320 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1321
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001322- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1323 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001324 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001325
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001326- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001327 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1328 the first call.
1329
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001330
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001331Extension modules
1332-----------------
1333
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001334- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1335 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1336
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001337- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1338 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1339 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1340 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1341 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1342 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1343 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001344
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001345- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1346
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001347- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1348
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001349- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1350 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1351
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001352- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1353 fewer false positives.
1354
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001355- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1356 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1357
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001358- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001359 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1360
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001361- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001362 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001363 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001364 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1365 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001366
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001367- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1368 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1369 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1370 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1371
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001372- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1373 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1374 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1375 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1376 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1377 #897625.
1378
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001379- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1380 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1381
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001382- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1383 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1384 and pops on either side of the deque.
1385
1386- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1387 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1388
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001389- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1390 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1391 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1392 other functions that expect a function argument.
1393
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001394- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1395
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001396- os.getsid was added.
1397
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001398- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1399 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1400 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1401
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001402- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1403
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001404- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1405
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001406- readline.clear_history was added.
1407
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001408- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1409
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001410- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1411
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001412- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1413
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001414- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1415
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001416- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1417
1418- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1419
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001420- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1421
1422- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1423
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001424- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1425 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1426 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1427
1428- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1429 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1430 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1431 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1432 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1433 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1434 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1435
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001436- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1437 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1438 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1439 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001440
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001441- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001442 iterators from a single iterable.
1443
1444- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1445 of raising a TypeError exception.
1446
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001447- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1448 as parameter.
1449
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001450Library
1451-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001452
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001453- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1454 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1455 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001456
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001457- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1458 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1459 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001460
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001461- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001462
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001463- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1464 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001465
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001466- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1467 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1468
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001469- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1470
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001471- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001472 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001473
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001474- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001475 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001476
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001477- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1478
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001479- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1480 on cygwin and mingw32.
1481
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001482- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1483
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001484- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1485 module.
1486
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001487- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1488 installation scheme for all platforms.
1489
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001490- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001491 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001492
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001493- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1494 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1495 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1496
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001497- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1498 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1499 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1500
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001501- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1502
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001503- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1504
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001505- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1506 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1507
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001508- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1509 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1510 type pattern with the same value exists.
1511
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001512- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1513 when run from the command prompt).
1514
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001515- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1516 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1517
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001518- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1519 default sort).
1520
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001521- Added global runctx function to profile module
1522
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001523- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1524
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001525- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1526
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001527- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1528
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001529- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001530 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1531 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1532 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1533 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1534 accordingly.
1535
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001536- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1537 decoding standards.
1538
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001539- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1540 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1541 called for all requests.
1542
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001543- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1544 they are passed to the compiler.
1545
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001546- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1547 indent, width and depth.
1548
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001549- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1550 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1551
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001552- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1553 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1554
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001555- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1556
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001557- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1558
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001559- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1560
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001561- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1562 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1563
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001564- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001565 for better performance.
1566
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001567- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001568
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001569- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1570 a string).
1571
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001572- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1573
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001574- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1575
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001576- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1577
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001578- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1579
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001580- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1581 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1582 list of fieldnames.
1583
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001584- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1585 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1586
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001587- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1588
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001589- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1590 empty lists.
1591
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001592- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1593 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1594 and shelves.
1595
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001596- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1597 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1598
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001599- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001600 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1601 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001602
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001603- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1604 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001605 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001606
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001607- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001608 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1609 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1610
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001611- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1612 and removed in Py2.4.
1613
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001614- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1615
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001616- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1617
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001618Tools/Demos
1619-----------
1620
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001621- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1622 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1623
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001624- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1625
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001626- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1627 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1628 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1629 destination in situations where both files are given.
1630
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001631- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1632 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1633 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1634 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1635
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001636- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1637
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001638- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1639 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1640 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1641 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1642 now.
1643
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001644- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1645 in effect
1646
1647- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1648 C-c C-h
1649
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001650- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1651 -d option was given.
1652
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001653Build
1654-----
1655
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001656- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1657 build under OS X.
1658
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001659- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1660 --enable-profiling.
1661
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001662- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1663 is configured --with-tsc.
1664
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001665- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1666 on AMD64.
1667
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001668- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1669 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1670
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001671- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1672 removed.
1673
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001674- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1675 supported (see PEP 11).
1676
1677- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1678
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001679- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1680
1681- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1682 (see PEP 11).
1683
1684- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1685 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1686
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001687C API
1688-----
1689
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001690- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1691 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1692 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1693
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001694- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1695 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1696 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1697 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1698
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001699- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1700 generator objects.
1701
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001702- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1703 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001704 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1705 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001706
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001707- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1708 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1709
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001710- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1711 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1712 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1713 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1714 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1715
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001716- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1717 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1718 about 10% faster.
1719
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001720- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1721 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1722
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001723- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1724 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1725 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1726 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1727
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001728Windows
1729-------
1730
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001731- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1732 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1733 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1734 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1735
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001736- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1737 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1738 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1739
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001740
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001741What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1742===============================
1743
1744*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1745
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001746IDLE
1747----
1748
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001749- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1750 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1751 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1752 context-menu actions.
1753
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001754- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1755 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1756 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1757 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1758 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1759 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1760 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1761 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1762 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1763
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001764
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001765What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1766=============================================
1767
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001768*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001769
1770Core and builtins
1771-----------------
1772
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001773- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001774 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001775 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1776
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001777Extension modules
1778-----------------
1779
1780- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1781 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1782 than once. This has been fixed.
1783
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001784- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1785 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1786 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1787 call.
1788
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001789- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1790
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001791Library
1792-------
1793
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001794- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1795 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1796
1797- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1798 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1799 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1800 restored.
1801
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001802IDLE
1803----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001804
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001805- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001806
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001807Build
1808-----
1809
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001810- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1811 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1812
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001813C API
1814-----
1815
1816Windows
1817-------
1818
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001819- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1820 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1821
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001822- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1823
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001824Mac
1825---
1826
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001827- Various fixes to pimp.
1828
1829- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1830
1831- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1832 more problems than it solves.
1833
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001834
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001835What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1836=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001837
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001838*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1839
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001840Core and builtins
1841-----------------
1842
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001843- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1844 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1845
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001846- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1847 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001848 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001849
1850- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1851 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1852 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001853 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001854
1855- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1856 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001857
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001858- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1859 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1860 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1861
1862- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001863 770247.
1864
1865- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001866
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001867Extension modules
1868-----------------
1869
1870- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1871 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1872
1873- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1874
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001875- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1876
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001877- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1878 contained within the _strptime module.
1879
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001880- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1881 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1882
1883- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001884 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1885
1886- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1887 the find_class attribute, if present.
1888
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001889- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001890
1891 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1892 (SF bug 763298).
1893
1894 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001895 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1896 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1897 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001898
1899 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1900
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001901Library
1902-------
1903
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001904- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1905
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001906- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1907 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1908 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1909 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1910 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1911 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1912 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1913 or Tester().
1914
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001915- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1916 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1917 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1918 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1919 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1920 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1921 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1922 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1923 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001924
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001925 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001926
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001927- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1928 weren't before was an oversight.
1929
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001930- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1931 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1932
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001933- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1934 when there are no lines.
1935
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001936- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1937 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1938
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001939- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1940 to child processes.
1941
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001942- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1943
1944- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1945
1946- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1947 xmlrpclib.
1948
1949- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1950 responses.
1951
1952- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1953 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1954
1955- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1956 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1957 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1958
1959- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1960 used as patterns.
1961
1962- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1963 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1964 than Tk 8.3.
1965
1966- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1967
1968- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001969
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001970Tools/Demos
1971-----------
1972
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001973- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1974
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001975- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1976
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001977- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001978
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001979Build
1980-----
1981
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001982- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1983
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001984- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1985
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001986- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1987 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001988
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001989- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1990 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1991 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001992
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001993C API
1994-----
1995
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001996- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1997 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1998
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001999Windows
2000-------
2001
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002002- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2003 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2004 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2005 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2006 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2007 Python exception ::
2008
2009 thread.error: can't start new thread
2010
2011 is raised now.
2012
2013- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2014 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2015 instead of from DLL teardown.
2016
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002017Mac
2018---
2019
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002020- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002021 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002022 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2023 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2024 the executable in the bundle.
2025
2026- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002027
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002028- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2029
2030- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2031 on Panther.
2032
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002033What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2034================================
2035
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002036*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002037
2038Core and builtins
2039-----------------
2040
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002041- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2042 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2043 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2044 with the -i option.
2045
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002046- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2047 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2048
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002049- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2050 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2051
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002052- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2053 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2054 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2055 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2056 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2057 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2058 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2059 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2060 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2061 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2062 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2063 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2064 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002065
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002066- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2067 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2068 embedded in a lambda expression.
2069
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002070- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2071 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2072 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2073 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2074 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2075
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002076- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2077 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2078 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2079
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002080- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2081 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2082
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002083- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2084 It's writable again.
2085
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002086- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2087 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2088 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002089 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002090
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002091- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2092 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2093 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2094
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002095Extension modules
2096-----------------
2097
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002098- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2099 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2100
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002101- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2102 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2103 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2104 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2105
2106- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2107 collection.
2108
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002109- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2110 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2111 unique within a single program run.
2112
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002113- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2114 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2115
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002116- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2117 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2118
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002119- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2120 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002121
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002122- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2123
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002124- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2125 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2126
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002127- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2128 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2129 for many BSD-derived systems.
2130
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002131
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002132Library
2133-------
2134
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002135- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2136 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2137 primary ones:
2138
2139 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2140 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2141 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2142
2143 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2144 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2145 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2146 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2147 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2148 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2149
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002150- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2151 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2152 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2153 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2154 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2155 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2156 argument.
2157
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002158- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2159 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2160 in the archive.
2161
2162- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2163 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2164
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002165- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2166 569574).
2167
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002168- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2169 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2170 no more.
2171
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002172- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2173 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2174 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2175 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2176 code coverage.
2177
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002178- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2179 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2180 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002181 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2182 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002183
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002184- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2185 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2186 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002187 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002188
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002189- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2190
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002191- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2192 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2193 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2194 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2195
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002196- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2197 handling.
2198
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002199- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2200 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2201
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002202- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2203 in socket.py.
2204
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002205- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2206
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002207- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2208 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2209 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2210 opener with proxy support.
2211
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002212- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2213
2214- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2215
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002216Tools/Demos
2217-----------
2218
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002219- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2220
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002221- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2222
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002223- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2224 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002225
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002226- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2227 files.
2228
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002229Build
2230-----
2231
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002232- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002233 different root directory.
2234
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002235C API
2236-----
2237
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002238- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2239 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2240 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2241 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2242 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2243 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2244 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2245 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2246 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2247 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2248
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002249- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2250 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2251 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2252 from Python.
2253
2254
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002255New platforms
2256-------------
2257
2258None this time.
2259
2260Tests
2261-----
2262
2263- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2264 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2265
2266Windows
2267-------
2268
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002269- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2270
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002271- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2272 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2273 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2274 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2275 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2276 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2277 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2278 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2279 that's what it's for.
2280
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002281Mac
2282---
2283
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002284- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2285 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2286 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2287 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002288- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2289 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2290- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002291
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002292SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2293------------------------------------
2294
2295430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2296598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2297622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2298661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2299683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2300697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2301713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2302724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2303727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2304729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2305730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2306731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2307732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2308733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2309735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2310740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2311744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2312745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2313747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2314749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2315751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2316753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2317755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2318757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2319760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2320
2321
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002322What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2323================================
2324
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002325*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002326
2327Core and builtins
2328-----------------
2329
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002330- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2331 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2332
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002333- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2334 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2335 and cannot be strings).
2336
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002337- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2338 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2339 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2340 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2341
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002342- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2343 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2344 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2345 Python itself.
2346
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002347- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2348 the referenced object, if it has one.
2349
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002350- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2351 the thread started at
2352 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2353
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002354- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2355 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2356 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2357 placed on a list index.
2358
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002359- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2360 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2361 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2362 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2363
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002364- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2365 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2366 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2367 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2368 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2369 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2370 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2371
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002372- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2373 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2374 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2375 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2376 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2377
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002378- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2379 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002380
2381- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2382 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2383 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2384 #693195.)
2385
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002386- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2387 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002388
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002389- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002390 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002391 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2392 interpreter executions, would fail.
2393
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002394- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002395 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002396 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002397
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002398Extension modules
2399-----------------
2400
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002401- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2402 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2403 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2404 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2405
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002406- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2407 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2408
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002409- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2410 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2411 and Greg Chapman.)
2412
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002413- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2414 recursively.
2415
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002416- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002417 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2418 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2419 leaks.
2420
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002421- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2422
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002423- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2424 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2425 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2426 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2427 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2428 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2429 #705836.
2430
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002431- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002432 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2433
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002434- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2435 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2436 See SF bug #692416.
2437
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002438- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2439 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2440
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002441- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2442 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2443 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002444
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002445- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002446 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2447 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2448
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002449- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2450 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2451 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2452 timeouts to work properly.
2453
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002454Library
2455-------
2456
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002457- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2458 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2459 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2460 future release.
2461
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002462- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2463 for querying platform dependent features.
2464
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002465- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002466
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002467- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2468 pickle protocol versions.
2469
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002470- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2471 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2472 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2473
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002474- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2475
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002476- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2477 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2478 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2479 modules.
2480
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002481- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2482 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2483 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2484
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002485- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2486 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2487
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002488- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2489 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2490 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2491
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002492- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002493 MS Office extensions.
2494
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002495- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2496 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2497
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002498- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2499 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2500
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002501- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2502 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2503 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2504 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2505 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2506 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2507
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002508- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2509 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2510 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002511
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002512- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2513 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2514 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2515
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002516- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2517
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002518- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2519 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2520 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2521
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002522Tools/Demos
2523-----------
2524
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002525- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2526 See the module docstring for details.
2527
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002528Build
2529-----
2530
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002531- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2532 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002533
2534C API
2535-----
2536
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002537- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2538
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002539- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2540 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2541 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2542
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002543- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2544 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002545
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002546 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2547 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2548 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002549
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002550- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002551 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2552
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002553- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2554 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2555 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002556
2557New platforms
2558-------------
2559
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002560None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002561
2562Tests
2563-----
2564
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002565- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2566 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002567
2568Windows
2569-------
2570
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002571- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2572 function.
2573
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002574- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2575 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002576
2577Mac
2578---
2579
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002580- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2581 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002582
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002583- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2584 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002585
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002586- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2587 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2588 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002589
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002590- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002591 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2592 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002593
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002594- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2595 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002596
2597
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002598What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2599=================================
2600
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002601*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002602
2603Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002604-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002605
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002606- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2607 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2608 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2609
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002610- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2611 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2612 (SF patch #664376.)
2613
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002614- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2615 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2616 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2617 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2618 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2619 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002620 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002621
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002622- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2623 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2624 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2625 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002626 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002627
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002628- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2629 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2630 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2631 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2632 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2633 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2634 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2635 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2636 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2637 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2638 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2639
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002640- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2641 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2642 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2643 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2644 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2645 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2646
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002647- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2648 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2649
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002650- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2651 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2652 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2653 case.)
2654
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002655- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2656 passed as unicode strings.
2657
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002658- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2659 See SF bug #683467.
2660
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002661- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2662 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2663
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002664- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2665
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002666- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2667
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002668- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2669 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2670 arguments.
2671
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002672- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2673 See SF bug #667147.
2674
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002675- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002676 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002677 See SF bug #676155.
2678
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002679- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002680 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002681 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2682 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2683 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2684 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2685 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2686 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002687
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002688Extension modules
2689-----------------
2690
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002691- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2692 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2693 tp_as_number pointer.
2694
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002695- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2696 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2697 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2698 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2699 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2700
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002701- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2702
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002703- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2704
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002705- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002706 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002707 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2708 patch #678531.)
2709
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002710- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2711 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2712
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002713- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2714 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2715
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002716- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2717
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002718- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2719 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2720 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2721
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002722- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2723
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002724- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2725 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2726
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002727- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002728
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002729- datetime changes:
2730
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002731 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2732
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002733 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2734 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2735 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2736 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2737 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2738 now.
2739
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002740 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002741 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2742 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002743
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002744 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002745 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002746 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2747 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2748 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2749 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002750
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002751 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2752 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2753 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002754 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2755
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002756 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2757 by a later example coded by Guido.
2758
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002759 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002760 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2761 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2762 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002763 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2764 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2765
2766 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2767 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2768 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2769 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2770 tzinfo subclass instance.
2771
2772 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2773 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2774 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2775 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2776 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2777 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2778 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2779 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002780
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002781 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2782 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2783 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2784 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2785 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002786 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2787
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002788 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002789
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002790 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2791 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2792 as a naive datetime object.
2793
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002794 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2795 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2796 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2797
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002798 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2799 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2800 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2801 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2802 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2803 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2804 comparison.
2805
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002806 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2807 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2808 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2809 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002810 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002811
2812 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002813
2814 and ::
2815
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002816 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2817
2818 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2819 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2820 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2821 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2822
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002823 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2824 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2825 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2826 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2827 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2828
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002829 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2830 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002831 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2832 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002833
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002834Library
2835-------
2836
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002837- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2838 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2839
2840- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2841 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2842 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2843 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2844 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2845 See PEP 307 for details.
2846
2847- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2848 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2849
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002850- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2851 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002852 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002853 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2854 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002855 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002856
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002857- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2858 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2859
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002860- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2861 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2862 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2863
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002864- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2865
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002866- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2867 exception.
2868
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002869- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2870 class.
2871
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002872- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2873 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2874 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2875
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002876- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2877 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2878
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002879- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002880 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2881 See SF bug #659228.
2882
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002883- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2884 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2885 See SF patch #651082.
2886
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002887- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002888
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002889- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2890 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2891
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002892- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002893 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002894
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002895- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2896 DOS paths from other platforms.
2897
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002898Tools/Demos
2899-----------
2900
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002901- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2902 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2903 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2904 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2905 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2906 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2907 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2908 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2909 example:
2910
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002911 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2912 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002913
2914 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2915
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002916
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002917Build
2918-----
2919
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002920- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2921 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2922 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002923 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2924
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002925 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2926
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002927- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2928 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2929 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2930 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2931 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2932 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2933 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2934 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2935 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2936
2937- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2938 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2939 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2940 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2941
2942- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2943 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2944
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002945C API
2946-----
2947
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002948- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2949 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002950
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002951- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2952 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2953 tp_as_number pointer.
2954
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002955- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2956 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2957 (SF #681367)
2958
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002959- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2960 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2961 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2962 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002963
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002964Tests
2965-----
2966
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002967- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002968 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2969 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2970 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2971 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2972 pydoc.)
2973
2974- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2975
2976- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002977
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002978Windows
2979-------
2980
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002981- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2982 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2983 time).
2984
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002985- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2986 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2987
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002988- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2989 release without strong cryptography.
2990
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002991- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002992 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002993
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002994- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2995 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2996
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002997Mac
2998---
2999
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003000- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3001 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003002
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003003- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3004 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3005 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003006
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003007- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3008 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003009
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003010- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3011 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3012 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3013 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003014
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003015- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003016 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3017 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3018 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003019
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003020
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003021What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003022=================================
3023
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003024*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003025
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003026Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003027--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003028
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003029- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3030
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003031- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3032 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003033 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003034 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003035 a different meaning than before.
3036
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003037- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003038 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003039 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003040
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003041- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003042 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003043 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003044
3045- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3046 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3047 and deallocation.
3048
3049- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3050 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3051
3052- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3053 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3054 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3055 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3056 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3057
3058- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3059 now detected by the garbage collector.
3060
3061- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3062 [SF bug 519621]
3063
3064- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3065 identifier.
3066
3067- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3068 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3069 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3070 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3071 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3072 [SF bug 563060]
3073
3074- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3075 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3076 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3077 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3078 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3079
3080- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3081 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3082 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3083
3084- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3085
3086- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3087 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3088 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3089 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3090 state of the slots would be lost.)
3091
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003092Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003093-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003094
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003095- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003096 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3097 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3098 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3099 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003100 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3101 Jython 2.1.
3102
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003103- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003104 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003105 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3106 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3107 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3108 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3109 these, see PEP 302.
3110
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003111- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3112 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3113 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3114
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003115- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3116 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3117 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3118
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003119- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3120 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3121 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3122
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003123- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3124 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3125 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3126 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3127 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3128 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3129 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3130 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3131 releases or implementations.
3132
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003133- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003134 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3135 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003136
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003137- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3138 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3139
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003140- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3141 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3142 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3143
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003144- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3145 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3146
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003147- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3148 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003149 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3150 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003151
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003152- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3153 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3154 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3155 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3156 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3157
3158 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3159 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3160 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3161 pattern.
3162
3163 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3164 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3165 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3166 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3167
3168 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3169 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3170 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3171 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3172 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3173 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3174
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003175- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3176 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3177 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3178 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3179 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3180 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3181 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3182 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003183
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003184- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3185 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3186 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3187 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3188 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003189 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3190 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3191 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3192 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3193 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3194 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3195 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003196
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003197- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3198 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3199
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003200- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3201 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3202 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3203 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3204 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3205 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3206 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3207 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3208 to Zack Weinberg!
3209
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003210- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3211 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3212 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3213 type. This has been fixed now.
3214
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003215- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3216 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3217 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3218
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003219- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3220 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3221 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3222 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3223 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3224 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3225 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3226 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003227 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003228
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003229- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3230 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3231 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003232
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003233- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3234 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3235 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3236 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3237 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3238 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3239 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3240 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003241 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003242 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3243 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3244
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003245- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3246 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3247 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3248 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3249 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3250 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3251 this.)
3252
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003253- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3254 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003255 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003256 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003257 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3258 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003259 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3260 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003261
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003262- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3263 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3264 currently running.
3265
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003266- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3267 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3268 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3269 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3270
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003271- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3272 as directory names.
3273
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003274- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3275 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3276
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003277- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3278 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3279
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003280- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003281 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3282 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003283
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003284- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3285 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3286 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3287 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3288 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3289
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003290- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3291 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3292 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3293 removed.
3294
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003295- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3296 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3297 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3298
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003299- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3300 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3301 to __debug__.
3302
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003303- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3304 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3305 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3306
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003307- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3308 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3309 deprecated now.
3310
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003311- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3312 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3313 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003314
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003315- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3316 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3317 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3318 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3319 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003320
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003321- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3322 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3323
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003324- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3325 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3326 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003327 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003328 is backward compatible.
3329
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003330- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3331 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3332 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3333 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3334 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3335
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003336- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3337 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3338 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3339 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3340 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3341 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003342
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003343- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3344 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3345
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003346- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3347 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3348
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003349- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3350 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3351 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3352 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3353 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3354
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003355- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3356 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3357 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3358
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003359- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003360 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3361
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003362- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3363 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3364 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003365
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003366- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3367 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3368
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003369- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3370 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3371 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3372
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003373- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3374
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003375Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003376-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003377
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003378- Added three operators to the operator module:
3379 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3380 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3381 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3382
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003383- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3384
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003385- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3386 archives.
3387
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003388- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3389 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3390 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3391
3392 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3393
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003394- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3395 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3396 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003397 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003398
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003399- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3400 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3401 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3402 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003403 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3404 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3405 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3406 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003407
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003408- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3409 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003410
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003411- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3412
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003413- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3414 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3415
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003416- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3417 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3418 supported.
3419
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003420- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3421
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003422- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3423 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003424
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003425- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3426 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3427
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003428- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3429
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003430- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3431 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3432
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003433- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3434 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3435 functions but callable type objects.
3436
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003437- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003438 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003439 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003440
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003441- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3442 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003443
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003444- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3445 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003446
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003447- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3448 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3449 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3450 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3451
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003452- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3453 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003454
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003455- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3456 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3457 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3458 and __imul__.
3459
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003460- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003461 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3462 is called.
3463
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003464- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3465 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3466 interpreter was compiled.
3467
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003468- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3469 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3470 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003471 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003472 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3473 1, not 2.
3474
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003475- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3476 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3477 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3478 limit.
3479
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003480- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3481 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3482 bug #623464.
3483
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003484- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3485 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3486 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3487 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3488
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003489Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003491
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003492- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3493
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003494- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3495 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3496 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3497 with Python 2.3a2.
3498
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003499- os.path exposes getctime.
3500
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003501- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003502 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003503 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003504 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003505 unit tests of floating point results.
3506
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003507- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3508 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3509 has been increased.
3510
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003511- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3512 executed.
3513
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003514- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3515 postinstallation script.
3516
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003517- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3518 test the current module.
3519
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003520- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003521 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3522 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3523 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3524 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3525
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003526- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003527 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003528 Ward's Optik package.
3529
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003530- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3531 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3532 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3533 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3534
3535- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3536 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003537 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003538
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003539- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3540 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3541 shelf are binary pickles.
3542
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003543- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3544 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3545
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003546- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3547 modules are iterators now.
3548
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003549- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3550 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3551 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3552 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3553 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3554 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003555
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003556- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3557 with their entity value.
3558
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003559- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3560
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003561- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3562 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003563
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003564- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3565 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003566 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003567
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003568- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3569 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3570 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3571 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3572 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3573 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3574 main():
3575
3576 import locale
3577 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3578
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003579- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3580 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3581
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003582- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3583 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3584 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3585 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3586 to the new standard.
3587
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003588- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3589 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3590 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3591 an extension to the database.
3592
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003593- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3594 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3595 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3596 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003597 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003598
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003599- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003600 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003601
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003602- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3603 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3604 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3605 bounded integers.
3606
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003607- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3608 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3609 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3610 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3611 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3612 in existence.
3613
3614 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3615 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3616 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3617 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3618 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3619 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3620
3621 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3622 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3623 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3624 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3625
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003626- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3627 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3628 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3629
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003630- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3631
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003632- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3633 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3634 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3635 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3636
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003637- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3638 argument.
3639
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003640- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3641 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3642 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3643 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3644 [SF patch 560794].
3645
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003646- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3647 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3648 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003649 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3650 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3651 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003652
3653- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3654 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003655
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003656- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3657 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3658 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3659 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003660
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003661- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3662 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3663 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3664 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3665 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3666
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003667- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003668
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003669- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3670
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003671- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3672 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3673 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3674 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3675 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3676 identical to None.
3677
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003678- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3679 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3680 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3681 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3682 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3683 results now.
3684
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003685- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3686 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3687
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003688- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3689 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3690 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3691 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3692 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3693 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3694 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3695 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3696
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003697- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3698
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003699- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3700 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3701
3702- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3703 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3704 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3705 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3706 and other systems.
3707
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003708- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3709 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3710 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3711 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 +00003712 work well with these.
3713
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003714- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3715
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003716- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003717 connections.
3718
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003719- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3720 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3721 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3722
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003723- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3724 sets
3725
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003726- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3727 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3728 name.
3729
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003730- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3731 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3732 passed in.
3733
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003734- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003735 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003736 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3737 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003738
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003739- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3740
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003741- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3742
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003743- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3744 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3745 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3746
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003747- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3748 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3749 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3750 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003751 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003752
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003753- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003754 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003755 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003756
3757- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3758 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3759 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3760
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003761- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003762 the value of its expression argument.
3763
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003764- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3765 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3766 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3767
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003768- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3769 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3770 skipstone browser was included.
3771
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003772- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3773 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3774
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003775Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003776-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003777
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003778- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3779 names in addition to accepting file names.
3780
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003781- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3782 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3783 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3784 still used and useful.)
3785
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003786- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3787 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3788 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3789 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003790
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003791- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3792 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3793 the generated binary.
3794
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003795Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003797
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003798- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3799
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003800- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3801 except in the hands of experts.
3802
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003803- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003804 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3805 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3806 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003807
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003808- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3809 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3810 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3811 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3812 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3813 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3814 builds.
3815
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003816- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3817 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3818 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3819 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3820 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3821 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3822 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3823 new type.
3824
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003825- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003826
3827 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3828 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3829 positive infinities.
3830
3831 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3832 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3833 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3834 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3835 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3836 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3837 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3838
3839 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3840
3841 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3842
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003843- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3844 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3845 size of the executable.
3846
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003847- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3848 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3849 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3850 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003851
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003852- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3853
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003854- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3855 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3856 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003857
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003858- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3859 well as Unix.
3860
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003861- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3862 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3863 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3864 modules in the README file for details.
3865
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003866C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003867-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003868
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003869- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3870 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003871 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003872 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003873 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003874
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003875- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3876 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3877 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3878 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3879 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3880 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003881 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003882 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3883 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3884 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3885 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3886 aligned.)
3887
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003888- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3889 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3890 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3891
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003892- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3893 level.
3894
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003895- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3896 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3897 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3898 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3899 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3900
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003901- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3902 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3903 code.
3904
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003905- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3906 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3907 adjusting for negative indices.
3908
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003909- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3910 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3911 object.
3912
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003913- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3914 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3915 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3916
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003917- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3918 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003919
3920- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3921
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003922- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3923 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3924 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3925 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3926
3927- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3928
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003929- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003930
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003931- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003932 without going through the buffer API.
3933
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003935
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003936- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3937 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3938 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3939 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3940
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003941- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3942 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3943
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003944- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003945 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3946
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003947New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003948-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003949
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003950- OpenVMS is now supported.
3951
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003952- AtheOS is now supported.
3953
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003954- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3955
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003956- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3957
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003958Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959-----
3960
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003961- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3962 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3963 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003964
3965Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003967
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003968- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3969 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3970 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3971 bugs.
3972 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003973 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003974 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3975 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003976 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003977
3978- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003979 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003980
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003981- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3982 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3983
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003984- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3985 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003986 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003987 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3988
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003989- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3990 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3991 use files" uninstall option).
3992
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003993- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3994
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003995- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3996 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3997
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003998- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3999 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4000 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4001
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004002- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4003 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4004 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4005 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4006 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004007 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4008 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4009 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004010
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004011- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004012 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004013 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4014 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4015 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4016 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4017 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4018 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4019 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4020 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4021 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4022 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4023 work around.
4024
4025- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4026 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4027 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4028 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4029 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4030 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4031 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4032 specified with O_CREAT too).
4033
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004034Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035----
4036
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004037- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004038
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004039- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4040 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4041 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4042
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004043- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4044 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4045 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4046
4047- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4048 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4049 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4050 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4051 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4052 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4053 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4054 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004055
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004056- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4057 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4058 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004059
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004060- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4061 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4062 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4063 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4064 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004065
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004066- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4067 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4068 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004069
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004070- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4071 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004072
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004073- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4074 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4075 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4076 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4077 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004078
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004079- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4080 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4081 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4082
4083- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4084 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4085 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004086
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004087- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4088 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4089 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4090 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004091 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004092
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004093- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4094 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004095
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004096- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4097 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004098
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004099- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004100 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004101 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4102 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004103
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004104
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004105What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004106===============================
4107
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004108*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4109
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004110Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004111--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004112
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004113- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4114 with a custom metaclass.
4115
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004116Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004117-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004118
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004119- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4120 are proxies.
4121
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004122Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004124
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004125- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4126 very short strings.
4127
4128- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4129 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4130 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4131 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4132 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4133
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004134Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004136
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004137- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4138 close or delete time).
4139
4140- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4141 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4142
4143- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4144
4145- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004146 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004147
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004148Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004150
4151Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004153
4154C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004156
4157New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004159
4160Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004162
4163Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004165
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004166- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4167
4168- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4169 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4170
4171- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4172 deleted at process exit time.
4173
4174- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4175 in backslash.
4176
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004177Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004179
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004180- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4181 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4182 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4183
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004184
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004185What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004186===========================
4187
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4189
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004190Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004191--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004192
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004193- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4194 been extensively updated. See
4195
4196 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4197
4198 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4199
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004200- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4201 deleted!
4202
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004203- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4204 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4205 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4206 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4207 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4208
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004209- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4210
4211 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4212 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4213
4214 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4215 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4216 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4217 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4218 supported anyway.
4219
4220 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4221 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4222
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004223- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4224 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4225 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4226 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4227 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004228
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004229- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4230 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4231 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4232
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004233Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004235
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004236- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4237 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4238 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4239 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4240 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4241 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004242 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4243 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4244 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4245 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004246
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004247- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4248 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4249 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4250
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004251Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004253
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004254- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4255
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004256Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004258
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004259- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4260 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4261 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4262 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4263 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4264 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4265
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004266- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4267
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004268- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4269
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004270- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4271
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004272- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4273 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4274 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4275
4276- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4277
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004278Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004280
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004281- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4282 off a search on Google.
4283
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004284Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004285-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004286
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004287- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4288 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4289 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4290 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4291 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4292 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4293 other platforms should do likewise.
4294
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004295- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4296 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4297 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4298
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004299C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004301
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004302- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4303 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4304 producing key-value pairs.
4305
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004306- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004307 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004308 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4309 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4310 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4311 previously went unchallenged.
4312
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004313New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004315
4316Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004317-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004318
4319Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004320-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004321
4322Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004324
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004325- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4326 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004327
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004328- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4329 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4330 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4331 home.
4332
4333
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004334What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004335===========================
4336
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4338
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004339Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004341
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004342- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4343 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004344
4345 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004346 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004347
4348 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4349 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004350 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004351 This needs to be documented.
4352
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004353- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4354 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4355
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004356- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4357 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4358 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4359
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004360- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4361 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4362
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004363- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4364 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4365 class forbids it).
4366
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004367- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4368 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4369 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4370
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004371- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4372
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004373Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004374-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004375
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004376- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4377 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004378 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004379
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004380- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4381 (like 1 + '').
4382
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004383Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004385
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004386- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4387 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4388 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4389 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004390 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004391 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4392
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004393- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4394 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4395 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4396 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4397
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004398- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4399 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004400 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4401 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4402 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004403
4404- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4405 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004406
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004407- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4408 bytes on its input.
4409
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004410Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004412
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004413- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004414 convenience function.
4415
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004416- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4417 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4418 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004419 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4420 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4421 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4422 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4423 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4424 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004425
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004426- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4427 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4428 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4429 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4430
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004431- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4432 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4433 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4434
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004435- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4436 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4437 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4438 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4439
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004440- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4441 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004443 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4444 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4445 new -l and -e options.
4446
4447- statcache is now deprecated.
4448
4449- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4450 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004452 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4453 time properly taken into account.
4454
4455- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4456 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4457 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4458 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4459
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004460Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004461-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004462
4463Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004464-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004465
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004466- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4467 is built with libdb3 if available.
4468
4469- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4470
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004471C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004473
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004474- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4475 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4476 PySequence_Size().
4477
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004478- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4479
4480- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4481 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4482 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4483
4484- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4485 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4486
4487- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4488 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4489
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004490New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004492
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004493- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4494 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4495
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004496- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4497 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4498
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004499- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4500
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004501Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004503
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004504- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4505 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4506
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004507Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004509
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004510Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004512
4513- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4514 removed completely in the next release.
4515
4516- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4517 OSX.
4518
4519- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4520 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4521
4522- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4523
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004524
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004525What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004526===========================
4527
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004528*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4529
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004530Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004532
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004533- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004534 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004535 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004536 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4537 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004538 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4539 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004540 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4541 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004542
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004543- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4544 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4545
4546- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4547 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4548
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004549Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004550-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004551
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004552- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4553 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4554 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4555 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4556 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4557 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4558 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4559 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4560
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004561- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4562 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4563 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4564 example).
4565
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004566- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004567 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004568 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004569 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004570
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004571- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4572 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4573 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004574 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004575
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004576- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4577 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4578 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4579 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4580 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4581 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4582
4583 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4584
4585 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4586
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004587Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004589
4590- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4591
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004592- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4593
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004594- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4595 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004596
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004597- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4598 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4599 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4600 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4601 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4602 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004603 attributes.
4604
4605- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4606 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4607 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004608
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004609- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4610 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4611 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004612
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004613- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4614 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4615 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004616 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4617 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4618
4619- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4620 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004621
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004622Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004623-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004624
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004625- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4626 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4627
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004628- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4629 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4630 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4631 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4632
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004633- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4634 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4635 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4636 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4637
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004638 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4639 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4640 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4641 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4642 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4643 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4644 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4645 without losing information).
4646
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004647- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004648 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4649 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4650 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4651 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4652 module).
4653
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004654 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004655 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4656 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4657 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4658 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004659
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004660- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004661 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4662 encoding.
4663
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004664- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4665 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4666
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004668 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4669
4670- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4671 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4672 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4673 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4674
4675- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4676
4677- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4678 ON, and OFF.
4679
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004680- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4681 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4682
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004683Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004684-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004685
4686- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4687 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4688 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004689
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004690- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4691 been added: -X and -E.
4692
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004693Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004694-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004695
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004696- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4697 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4698
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004699C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004701
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004702- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4703 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4704 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4705 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4706 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4707
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004708- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4709 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4710 as long) arguments.
4711
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004712- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4713 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4714 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4715 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4716 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4717 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4718
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004719- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4720 input.
4721
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004722New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004724
4725Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004727
4728Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004729-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004730
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004731- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4732 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4733 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4734
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004735- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4736 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4737 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004738 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004739
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004740 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4741 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4742 import signal
4743 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004744
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004746 while 1:
4747 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004748 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004749 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4750 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4751 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4752 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004753
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004754
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004755What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4756===========================
4757
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4759
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004760Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004762
4763- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4764 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4765 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4766
4767- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4768 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4769 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4770 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4771 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4772 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4773 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004774
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004775- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004776 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004777 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4778 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4779 associate a docstring with a property.
4780
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004781- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4782 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4783 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4784 other built-in object types.
4785
4786- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4787 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4788 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4789 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4790 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4791
4792- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4793 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4794
4795- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4796 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004797 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004798 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4799 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4800 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4801 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4802 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4803
4804- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4805 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4806 class.
4807
4808- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4809 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4810 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4811 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4812
4813- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4814 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4815 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4816 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4817
4818- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4819 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4820
4821- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4822 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4823 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4824 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4825 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004826 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004827 with the same value as s.
4828
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004829- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4830
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004831Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004832----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004833
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004834- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4835
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004836- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4837 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4838 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4839 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4840 objects.
4841
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004842- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4843 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004844 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4845 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4846
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004847- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4848 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4849 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4850
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004851Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004852-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004853
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004854- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4855 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4856 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4857 by the instances.
4858
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004859- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4860 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4861 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4862
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004863- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4864 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4865 before the entire comparison is complete.
4866
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004867- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4868 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4869 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4870
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004871- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4872 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4873 getwriter().
4874
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004875- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4876 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4877
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004878- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004879 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4880 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4881
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004882- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4883 iterable object.
4884
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004885- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4886 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004887
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004888- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4889 authentication.
4890
4891- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4892 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004893
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004894- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004895 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4896 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4897 a sample driver.)
4898
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004899Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004901
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004902- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4903 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4904 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4905 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4906 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4907 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4908 kernel has large file support.
4909
4910- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4911 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4912 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4913 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4914 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4915
4916- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4917 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4918 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4919
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004920C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004922
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004923- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4924 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4925
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004926New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004928
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004929- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4930 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4931
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004932Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004933-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004934
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004935- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4936 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4937 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4938 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4939 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4940
4941- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4942 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4943 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4944 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4945
4946- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4947 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4948
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004949Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004951
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004952- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004953 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4954 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004955
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004956
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004957What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4958===========================
4959
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4961
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004962Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004963----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004964
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004965- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4966 big to represent as a C double.
4967
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004968- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4969 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4970 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4971 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4972 restriction).
4973
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004974- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4975 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4976 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4977 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4978 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4979
4980 >>> dir([])
4981 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4982 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4983 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4984 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4985 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4986 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4987 'reverse', 'sort']
4988
4989 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4990
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004991- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004992 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4993 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4994 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4995 OverflowError exception.
4996
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004997- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004998 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004999 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5000 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5001 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5002 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5003 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005004 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5006 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5007
5008 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5009 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5010 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5011 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005012
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005013- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005014 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5015 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5016 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5017 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5018 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5019 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5020 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5021 once it is created.
5022
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005023- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5024 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5025 (key, value) pairs.
5026
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005027- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005028 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5029 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5030
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005031- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5032 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5033 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5034 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5035 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005036
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005037- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005038 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5039 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5040
5041 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5042
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005043- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005044 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5045
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005046Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005048
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005049- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005050 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5051 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005052
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005053- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5054 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5055 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5056 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5057 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5058 in this area anymore).
5059
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005060- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5061 threading.Timer.
5062
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005063- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5064 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5065
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005066- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005067 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5068
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005069- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005070 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5071 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5072 converted to Python longs.
5073
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005074- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005075 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5076
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005077- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5078 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5079 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5080
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005081Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005083
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005084- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5085 division operators as per PEP 238.
5086
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005087Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005089
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005090- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5091 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5092 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5093 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5094
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005095C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005097
5098- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005099
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005100- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5101 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005102 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005103
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005104 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5105 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005106 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005107 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005108
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005109- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005110 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5111 module:
5112
5113 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005114
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005115 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5116 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005117
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005118 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5119 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005120
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005121 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5122
5123 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5124
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005125- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005126 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5127 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5128 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005129
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005130New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005132
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005133- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5134 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5135 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5136 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5137 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005138
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005139Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005141
5142Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005143-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005144
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005145- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5146 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5147 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5148 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005149 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5150 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5151 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5152 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5153 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005154
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005155- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005156 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5157
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005158
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005159What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5160===========================
5161
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005162*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5163
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005164Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005166
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005167- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5168 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5169
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005170- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5171 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5172 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005173
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005174- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5175 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5176 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5177 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005178
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005179- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5180
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005181- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005182
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005183Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005184-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005185
5186- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005187 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005188 the module docstring for details.
5189
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005190Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005191-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005192
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005193- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005194 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5195 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5196 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005197
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005198- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5199 Nick Mathewson.
5200
5201Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005203
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005204- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5205 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5206 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5207 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5208 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5209 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5210 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5211 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5212
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005213- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5214 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5215 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5216 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5217
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005218- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5219 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5220 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5221 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5222 come a long way).
5223
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005224- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5225 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5226 write filters for these warnings).
5227
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005228- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5229 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5230 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5231 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5232 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5233
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005234- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5235 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5236 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5237 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5238 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5239 older distribution.
5240
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005241Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005242-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005243
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005244- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5245 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005246 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005247
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005248- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5249 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5250 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5251
5252- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5253
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005254- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5255
5256- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5257
5258- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5259
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005260- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005261
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005262- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5263
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005264New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005266
5267C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005268-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005269
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005270- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5271 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5272 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5273 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5274 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5275 against buffer overruns.
5276
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005277- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005278 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5279 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005280 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5281 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5282 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5283
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005284- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5285 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5286 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5287 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5288 deprecated.
5289
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005290Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005291-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005292
5293- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5294 relevant is found.
5295
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005296
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005297What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005298===========================
5299
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005300*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5301
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005302Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005303----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005304
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005305- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5306 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5307 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5308 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5309 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5310 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5311 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5312 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005313 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005314 repaired.
5315
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005316- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005317 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005318 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5319 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5320 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5321 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5322 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5323 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5324 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5325 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5326
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005327- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5328 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5329 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5330 leading BMO character).
5331
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005332- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5333 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5334 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5335
5336 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5337 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5338 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005339
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005340 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5341 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5342 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5343 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5344 for various simple to use conversions.
5345
5346 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5347 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5348
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005349 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5350 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5351 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5352 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5353 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5354 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5355 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5356 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5357 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5358 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5359 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5360 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5361 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5362 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5363 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005364
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005365- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5366 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5367 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005368 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005369 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005370
5371 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005372 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5373 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5374 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5375 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5376 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005377 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5378 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005379
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005380 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5381 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5382 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005383 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005384
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005385- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5386 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5387 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5388 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5389 floating arithmetic,
5390
5391 x = 9007199254740992.0
5392 print long(x)
5393
5394 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5395 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5396 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5397 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5398 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5399 functions are of good quality).
5400
5401 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5402 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5403 algorithms to break.
5404
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005405- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5406 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5407 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5408 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5409 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5410 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5411 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5412 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5413 order.
5414
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005415- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5416 operation along the most common code paths.
5417
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005418- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5419 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5420
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005421- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5422 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5423 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5424 {}.update(UserDict())
5425
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005426- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5427 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5428 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5429 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5430 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5431 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5432 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5433 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5434
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005435- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005436 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005437
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005438 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005439 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5440 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005441 join() method of strings
5442 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005443 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5444 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005445 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005446 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005447
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005448- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5449 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5450
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005451- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5452 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5453
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005454- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5455 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5456 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5457 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5458
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005459- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5460 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005461 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005462 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5463 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005464
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005465- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5466
5467
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005468Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005469-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005470
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005471- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005472 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005473 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5474 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5475
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005476- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5477 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5478
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005479- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5480 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5481 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5482 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5483
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005484- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5485 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5486 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5487
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005488- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5489
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005490- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5491
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005492- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5493 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5494 that are still imported into string.py).
5495
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005496- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5497
5498- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5499 Now it does.
5500
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005501- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5502
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005503- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5504 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5505 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5506 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5507 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005508 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5509 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005510
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005511- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5512 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5513 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5514 'help(object)'.
5515
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005516Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005517-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005518
5519- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005520 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005521 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5522 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5523
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005524- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005525 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5526 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005527
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005528C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005529-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005530
5531- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5532 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005533
5534----
5535
5536**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**