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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000015- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
16 deprecated, but the nuissance warning will not be issued.
17
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000018- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
19 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
20 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
21 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
22 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
23 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
24 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
25 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
26 destroyed.
27
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000028- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
29 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
30 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
31 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
32 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
33 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
34 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
35 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
36
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000037- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
38 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
39 character other than a space.
40
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000041- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
42 by the function object or by the method object, the function
43 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
44 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
45 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
46 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
47 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
48 attributes with the same name.
49
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000050- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
51 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
52 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
53 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
54 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
55 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
56 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
57 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
58 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
59 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
60 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
61 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
62 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
63 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000064
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000065- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
66 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
67 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
68 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
69 This has been repaired.
70
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000071- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
72
73- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
74
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000075- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
76 over a sequence.
77
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000078- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
79
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000080- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
81 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
82 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
83 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
84 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
85 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
86 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
87 records with equal keys is unchanged).
88
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000089- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
90 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000091
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000092- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
93 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
94 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
95
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000096- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
97 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
98 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
99 freelist.
100
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000101- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
102 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
103
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000104- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
105 number.
106
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000107- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
108 a TypeError exception.
109
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000110- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
111 820195.
112
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000113- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
114 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
115 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
116
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000117Extension modules
118-----------------
119
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000120- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
121 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
122 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
123 other functions that expect a function argument.
124
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000125- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
126
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000127- os.getsid was added.
128
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000129- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
130 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
131 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
132
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000133- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
134
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000135- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
136
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000137- readline.clear_history was added.
138
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000139- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
140
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000141- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
142
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000143- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
144
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000145- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
146
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000147- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
148
149- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
150
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000151- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
152
153- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
154
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000155- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
156 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
157 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
158
159- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
160 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
161 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
162 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
163 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
164 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
165 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
166
167- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
168 iterators from a single iterable.
169
170- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
171 of raising a TypeError exception.
172
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000173Library
174-------
175
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000176- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
177 they are passed to the compiler.
178
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000179- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
180 indent, width and depth.
181
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000182- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
183 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
184
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000185- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
186 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
187
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000188- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
189
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000190- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
191
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000192- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
193
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000194- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
195 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
196
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000197- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
198
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000199- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
200 a string).
201
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000202- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
203
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000204- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
205
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000206- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
207
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000208- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
209
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000210- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
211 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
212 list of fieldnames.
213
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000214- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
215 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
216
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000217- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
218
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000219- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
220 empty lists.
221
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000222- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
223 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
224 and shelves.
225
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000226- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
227 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
228
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000229- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000230 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
231 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000232
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000233- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
234 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000235 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000236
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000237- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000238 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
239 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
240
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000241- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
242 and removed in Py2.4.
243
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000244- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
245
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000246Tools/Demos
247-----------
248
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000249- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
250
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000251- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
252 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
253 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
254 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
255
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000256- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
257
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000258- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
259 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
260 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
261 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
262 now.
263
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000264- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
265 in effect
266
267- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
268 C-c C-h
269
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000270- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
271 -d option was given.
272
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000273Build
274-----
275
276C API
277-----
278
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000279- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
280 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
281 about 10% faster.
282
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000283- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
284 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
285
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000286- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
287 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
288 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
289 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
290
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000291New platforms
292-------------
293
294Tests
295-----
296
297Windows
298-------
299
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000300- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
301 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
302 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
303 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
304
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000305- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
306 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
307 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
308
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000309Mac
310----
311
312
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000313What's New in Python 2.3 final?
314===============================
315
316*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
317
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000318IDLE
319----
320
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000321- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
322 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
323 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
324 context-menu actions.
325
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000326- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
327 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
328 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
329 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
330 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
331 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
332 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
333 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
334 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
335
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000336
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000337What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
338=============================================
339
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000340*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000341
342Core and builtins
343-----------------
344
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000345- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000346 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000347 comment at the end are still unsupported.
348
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000349Extension modules
350-----------------
351
352- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
353 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
354 than once. This has been fixed.
355
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000356- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
357 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
358 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
359 call.
360
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000361- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
362
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000363Library
364-------
365
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000366- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
367 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
368
369- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
370 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
371 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
372 restored.
373
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000374IDLE
375----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000376
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000377- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000378
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000379Build
380-----
381
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000382- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
383 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
384
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000385C API
386-----
387
388Windows
389-------
390
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000391- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
392 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
393
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000394- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
395
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000396Mac
397---
398
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000399- Various fixes to pimp.
400
401- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
402
403- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
404 more problems than it solves.
405
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000406
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000407What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
408=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000409
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000410*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
411
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000412Core and builtins
413-----------------
414
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000415- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
416 by sys.setcheckinterval().
417
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000418- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
419 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000420 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000421
422- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
423 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
424 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000425 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000426
427- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
428 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000429
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000430- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
431 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
432 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
433
434- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000435 770247.
436
437- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000438
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000439Extension modules
440-----------------
441
442- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
443 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
444
445- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
446
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000447- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
448
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000449- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
450 contained within the _strptime module.
451
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000452- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
453 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
454
455- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000456 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
457
458- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
459 the find_class attribute, if present.
460
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000461- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000462
463 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
464 (SF bug 763298).
465
466 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000467 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
468 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
469 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000470
471 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
472
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000473Library
474-------
475
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000476- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
477
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000478- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
479 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
480 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
481 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
482 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
483 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
484 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
485 or Tester().
486
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000487- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
488 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
489 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
490 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
491 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
492 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
493 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
494 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
495 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000496
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000497 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000498
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000499- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
500 weren't before was an oversight.
501
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000502- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
503 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
504
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000505- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
506 when there are no lines.
507
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000508- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
509 which could occur with Tk 8.4
510
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000511- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
512 to child processes.
513
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000514- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
515
516- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
517
518- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
519 xmlrpclib.
520
521- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
522 responses.
523
524- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
525 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
526
527- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
528 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
529 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
530
531- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
532 used as patterns.
533
534- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
535 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
536 than Tk 8.3.
537
538- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
539
540- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000541
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000542Tools/Demos
543-----------
544
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000545- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
546
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000547- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
548
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000549- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000550
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000551Build
552-----
553
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000554- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
555
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000556- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
557
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000558- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
559 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000560
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000561- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
562 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
563 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000564
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000565C API
566-----
567
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000568- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
569 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
570
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000571Windows
572-------
573
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000574- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
575 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
576 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
577 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
578 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
579 Python exception ::
580
581 thread.error: can't start new thread
582
583 is raised now.
584
585- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
586 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
587 instead of from DLL teardown.
588
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000589Mac
590---
591
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000592- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000593 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000594 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
595 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
596 the executable in the bundle.
597
598- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000599
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000600- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
601
602- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
603 on Panther.
604
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000605What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
606================================
607
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000608*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000609
610Core and builtins
611-----------------
612
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000613- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
614 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
615 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
616 with the -i option.
617
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000618- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
619 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
620
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000621- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
622 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
623
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000624- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
625 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
626 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
627 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
628 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
629 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
630 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
631 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
632 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
633 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
634 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
635 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
636 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000637
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000638- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
639 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
640 embedded in a lambda expression.
641
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000642- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
643 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
644 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
645 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
646 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
647
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000648- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
649 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
650 matches the restriction on classic classes.
651
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000652- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
653 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
654
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000655- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
656 It's writable again.
657
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000658- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
659 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
660 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000661 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000662
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000663- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
664 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
665 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
666
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000667Extension modules
668-----------------
669
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000670- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
671 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
672
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000673- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
674 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
675 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
676 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
677
678- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
679 collection.
680
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000681- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
682 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
683 unique within a single program run.
684
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000685- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
686 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
687
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000688- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
689 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
690
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000691- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
692 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000693
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000694- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
695
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000696- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
697 Fixes SF bug #730685.
698
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000699- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
700 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
701 for many BSD-derived systems.
702
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000703
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000704Library
705-------
706
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000707- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
708 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
709 primary ones:
710
711 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
712 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
713 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
714
715 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
716 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
717 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
718 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
719 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
720 framework features (which doctest lacks).
721
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000722- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
723 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
724 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
725 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
726 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
727 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
728 argument.
729
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000730- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
731 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
732 in the archive.
733
734- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
735 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
736
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000737- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
738 569574).
739
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000740- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
741 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
742 no more.
743
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000744- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
745 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
746 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
747 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
748 code coverage.
749
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000750- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
751 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
752 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000753 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
754 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000755
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000756- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
757 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
758 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000759 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000760
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000761- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
762
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000763- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
764 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
765 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
766 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
767
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000768- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
769 handling.
770
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000771- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
772 __doc__ of data descriptors.
773
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000774- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
775 in socket.py.
776
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000777- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
778
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000779- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
780 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
781 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
782 opener with proxy support.
783
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000784- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
785
786- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
787
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000788Tools/Demos
789-----------
790
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000791- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
792
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000793- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
794
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000795- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
796 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000797
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000798- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
799 files.
800
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000801Build
802-----
803
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000804- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000805 different root directory.
806
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000807C API
808-----
809
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000810- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
811 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
812 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
813 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
814 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
815 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
816 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
817 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
818 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
819 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
820
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000821- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
822 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
823 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
824 from Python.
825
826
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000827New platforms
828-------------
829
830None this time.
831
832Tests
833-----
834
835- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
836 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
837
838Windows
839-------
840
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000841- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
842
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000843- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
844 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
845 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
846 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
847 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
848 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
849 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
850 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
851 that's what it's for.
852
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000853Mac
854---
855
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000856- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
857 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
858 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
859 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000860- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
861 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
862- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000863
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000864SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
865------------------------------------
866
867430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
868598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
869622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
870661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
871683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
872697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
873713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
874724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
875727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
876729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
877730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
878731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
879732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
880733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
881735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
882740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
883744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
884745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
885747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
886749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
887751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
888753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
889755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
890757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
891760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
892
893
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000894What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
895================================
896
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000897*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000898
899Core and builtins
900-----------------
901
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000902- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
903 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
904
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000905- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
906 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
907 and cannot be strings).
908
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000909- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
910 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
911 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
912 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
913
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000914- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
915 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
916 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
917 Python itself.
918
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000919- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
920 the referenced object, if it has one.
921
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000922- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
923 the thread started at
924 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
925
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000926- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
927 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
928 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
929 placed on a list index.
930
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000931- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
932 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
933 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
934 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
935
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000936- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
937 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
938 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
939 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
940 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
941 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
942 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
943
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000944- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
945 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
946 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
947 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
948 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
949
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000950- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
951 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000952
953- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
954 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
955 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
956 #693195.)
957
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000958- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
959 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000960
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000961- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000962 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000963 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
964 interpreter executions, would fail.
965
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000966- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000967 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000968 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000969
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000970Extension modules
971-----------------
972
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000973- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
974 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
975 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
976 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
977
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000978- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
979 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
980
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000981- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
982 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
983 and Greg Chapman.)
984
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000985- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
986 recursively.
987
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000988- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000989 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
990 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
991 leaks.
992
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000993- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
994
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000995- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
996 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
997 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
998 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
999 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1000 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1001 #705836.
1002
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001003- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001004 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1005
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001006- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1007 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1008 See SF bug #692416.
1009
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001010- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1011 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1012
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001013- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1014 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1015 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001016
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001017- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001018 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1019 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1020
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001021- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1022 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1023 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1024 timeouts to work properly.
1025
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001026Library
1027-------
1028
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001029- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1030 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1031 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1032 future release.
1033
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001034- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1035 for querying platform dependent features.
1036
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001037- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001038
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001039- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1040 pickle protocol versions.
1041
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001042- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1043 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1044 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1045
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001046- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1047
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001048- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1049 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1050 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1051 modules.
1052
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001053- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1054 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1055 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1056
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001057- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1058 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1059
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001060- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1061 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1062 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1063
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001064- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001065 MS Office extensions.
1066
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001067- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1068 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1069
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001070- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1071 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1072
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001073- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1074 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1075 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1076 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1077 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1078 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1079
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001080- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1081 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1082 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001083
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001084- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1085 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1086 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1087
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001088- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1089
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001090- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1091 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1092 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1093
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001094Tools/Demos
1095-----------
1096
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001097- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1098 See the module docstring for details.
1099
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001100Build
1101-----
1102
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001103- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1104 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001105
1106C API
1107-----
1108
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001109- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1110
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001111- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1112 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1113 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1114
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001115- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1116 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001117
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001118 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1119 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1120 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001121
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001122- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001123 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1124
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001125- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1126 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1127 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001128
1129New platforms
1130-------------
1131
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001132None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001133
1134Tests
1135-----
1136
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001137- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1138 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001139
1140Windows
1141-------
1142
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001143- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1144 function.
1145
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001146- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1147 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001148
1149Mac
1150---
1151
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001152- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1153 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001154
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001155- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1156 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001157
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001158- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1159 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1160 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001161
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001162- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001163 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1164 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001165
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001166- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1167 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001168
1169
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001170What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1171=================================
1172
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001173*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001174
1175Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001176-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001177
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001178- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1179 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1180 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1181
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001182- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1183 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1184 (SF patch #664376.)
1185
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001186- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1187 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1188 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1189 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1190 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1191 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001192 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001193
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001194- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1195 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1196 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1197 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001198 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001199
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001200- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1201 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1202 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1203 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1204 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1205 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1206 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1207 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1208 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1209 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1210 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1211
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001212- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1213 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1214 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1215 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1216 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1217 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1218
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001219- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1220 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1221
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001222- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1223 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1224 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1225 case.)
1226
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001227- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1228 passed as unicode strings.
1229
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001230- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1231 See SF bug #683467.
1232
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001233- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1234 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1235
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001236- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1237
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001238- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1239
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001240- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1241 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1242 arguments.
1243
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001244- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1245 See SF bug #667147.
1246
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001247- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001248 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001249 See SF bug #676155.
1250
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001251- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001252 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001253 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1254 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1255 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1256 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1257 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1258 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001259
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001260Extension modules
1261-----------------
1262
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001263- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1264 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1265 tp_as_number pointer.
1266
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001267- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1268 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1269 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1270 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1271 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1272
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001273- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1274
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001275- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1276
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001277- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001278 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001279 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1280 patch #678531.)
1281
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001282- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1283 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1284
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001285- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1286 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1287
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001288- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1289
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001290- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1291 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1292 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1293
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001294- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1295
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001296- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1297 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1298
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001299- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001300
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001301- datetime changes:
1302
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001303 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1304
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001305 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1306 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1307 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1308 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1309 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1310 now.
1311
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001312 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001313 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1314 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001315
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001316 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001317 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001318 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1319 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1320 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1321 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001322
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001323 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1324 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1325 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001326 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1327
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001328 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1329 by a later example coded by Guido.
1330
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001331 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001332 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1333 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1334 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001335 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1336 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1337
1338 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1339 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1340 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1341 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1342 tzinfo subclass instance.
1343
1344 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1345 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1346 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1347 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1348 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1349 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1350 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1351 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001352
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001353 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1354 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1355 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1356 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1357 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001358 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1359
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001360 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001361
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001362 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1363 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1364 as a naive datetime object.
1365
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001366 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1367 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1368 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1369
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001370 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1371 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1372 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1373 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1374 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1375 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1376 comparison.
1377
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001378 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1379 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1380 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1381 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001382 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001383
1384 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001385
1386 and ::
1387
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001388 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1389
1390 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1391 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1392 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1393 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1394
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001395 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1396 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1397 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1398 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1399 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1400
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001401 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1402 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001403 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1404 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001405
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001406Library
1407-------
1408
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001409- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1410 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1411
1412- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1413 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1414 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1415 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1416 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1417 See PEP 307 for details.
1418
1419- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1420 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1421
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001422- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1423 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001424 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001425 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1426 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001427 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001428
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001429- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1430 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1431
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001432- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1433 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1434 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1435
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001436- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1437
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001438- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1439 exception.
1440
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001441- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1442 class.
1443
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001444- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1445 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1446 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1447
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001448- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1449 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1450
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001451- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001452 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1453 See SF bug #659228.
1454
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001455- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1456 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1457 See SF patch #651082.
1458
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001459- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001460
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001461- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1462 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1463
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001464- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001465 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001466
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001467- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1468 DOS paths from other platforms.
1469
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001470Tools/Demos
1471-----------
1472
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001473- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1474 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1475 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1476 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1477 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1478 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1479 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1480 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1481 example:
1482
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001483 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1484 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001485
1486 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1487
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001488
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001489Build
1490-----
1491
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001492- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1493 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1494 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001495 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1496
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001497 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1498
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001499- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1500 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1501 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1502 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1503 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1504 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1505 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1506 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1507 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1508
1509- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1510 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1511 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1512 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1513
1514- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1515 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1516
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001517C API
1518-----
1519
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001520- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1521 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001522
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001523- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1524 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1525 tp_as_number pointer.
1526
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001527- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1528 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1529 (SF #681367)
1530
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001531- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1532 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1533 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1534 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001535
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001536Tests
1537-----
1538
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001539- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001540 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1541 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1542 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1543 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1544 pydoc.)
1545
1546- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1547
1548- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001549
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001550Windows
1551-------
1552
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001553- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1554 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1555 time).
1556
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001557- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1558 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1559
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001560- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1561 release without strong cryptography.
1562
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001563- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001564 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001565
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001566- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1567 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1568
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001569Mac
1570---
1571
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001572- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1573 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001574
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001575- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1576 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1577 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001578
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001579- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1580 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001581
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001582- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1583 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1584 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1585 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001586
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001587- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001588 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1589 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1590 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001591
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001592
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001593What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001594=================================
1595
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001596*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001597
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001598Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001599--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001600
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001601- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1602
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001603- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1604 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001605 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001606 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001607 a different meaning than before.
1608
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001609- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001610 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001611 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001612
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001613- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001614 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001615 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001616
1617- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1618 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1619 and deallocation.
1620
1621- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1622 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1623
1624- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1625 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1626 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1627 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1628 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1629
1630- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1631 now detected by the garbage collector.
1632
1633- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1634 [SF bug 519621]
1635
1636- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1637 identifier.
1638
1639- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1640 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1641 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1642 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1643 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1644 [SF bug 563060]
1645
1646- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1647 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1648 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1649 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1650 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1651
1652- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1653 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1654 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1655
1656- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1657
1658- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1659 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1660 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1661 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1662 state of the slots would be lost.)
1663
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001664Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001665-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001666
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001667- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001668 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1669 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1670 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1671 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001672 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1673 Jython 2.1.
1674
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001675- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001676 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001677 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1678 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1679 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1680 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1681 these, see PEP 302.
1682
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001683- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1684 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1685 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1686
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001687- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1688 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1689 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1690
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001691- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1692 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1693 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1694
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001695- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1696 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1697 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1698 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1699 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1700 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1701 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1702 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1703 releases or implementations.
1704
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001705- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001706 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1707 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001708
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001709- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1710 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1711
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001712- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1713 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1714 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1715
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001716- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1717 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1718
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001719- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1720 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001721 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1722 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001723
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001724- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1725 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1726 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1727 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1728 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1729
1730 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1731 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1732 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1733 pattern.
1734
1735 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1736 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1737 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1738 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1739
1740 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1741 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1742 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1743 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1744 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1745 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1746
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001747- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1748 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1749 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1750 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1751 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1752 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1753 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1754 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001755
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001756- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1757 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1758 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1759 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1760 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001761 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1762 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1763 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1764 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1765 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1766 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1767 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001768
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001769- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1770 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1771
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001772- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1773 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1774 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1775 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1776 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1777 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1778 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1779 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1780 to Zack Weinberg!
1781
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001782- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1783 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1784 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1785 type. This has been fixed now.
1786
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001787- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1788 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1789 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1790
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001791- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1792 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1793 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1794 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1795 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1796 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1797 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1798 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001799 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001800
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001801- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1802 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1803 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001804
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001805- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1806 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1807 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1808 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1809 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1810 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1811 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1812 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001813 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001814 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1815 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1816
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001817- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1818 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1819 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1820 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1821 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1822 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1823 this.)
1824
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001825- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1826 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001827 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001828 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001829 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1830 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001831 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1832 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001833
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001834- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1835 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1836 currently running.
1837
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001838- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1839 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1840 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1841 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1842
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001843- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1844 as directory names.
1845
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001846- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1847 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1848
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001849- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1850 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1851
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001852- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001853 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1854 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001855
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001856- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1857 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1858 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1859 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1860 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1861
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001862- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1863 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1864 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1865 removed.
1866
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001867- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1868 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1869 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1870
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001871- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1872 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1873 to __debug__.
1874
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001875- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1876 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1877 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1878
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001879- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1880 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1881 deprecated now.
1882
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001883- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1884 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1885 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001886
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001887- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1888 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1889 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1890 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1891 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001892
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001893- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1894 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1895
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001896- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1897 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1898 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001899 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001900 is backward compatible.
1901
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001902- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1903 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1904 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1905 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1906 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1907
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001908- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1909 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1910 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1911 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1912 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1913 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001914
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001915- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1916 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1917
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001918- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1919 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1920
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001921- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1922 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1923 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1924 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1925 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1926
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001927- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1928 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1929 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1930
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001931- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001932 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1933
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001934- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1935 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1936 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001937
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001938- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1939 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1940
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001941- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1942 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1943 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1944
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001945- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1946
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001947Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001948-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001949
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001950- Added three operators to the operator module:
1951 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1952 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1953 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1954
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001955- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1956
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001957- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1958 archives.
1959
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001960- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1961 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1962 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1963
1964 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1965
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001966- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1967 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1968 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001969 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001970
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001971- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1972 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1973 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1974 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001975 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1976 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1977 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1978 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001979
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001980- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1981 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001982
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001983- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1984
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001985- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1986 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1987
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001988- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1989 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1990 supported.
1991
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001992- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1993
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001994- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1995 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001996
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001997- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1998 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1999
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002000- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2001
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002002- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2003 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2004
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002005- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2006 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2007 functions but callable type objects.
2008
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002009- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002010 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002011 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002012
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002013- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2014 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002015
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002016- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2017 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002018
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002019- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2020 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2021 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2022 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2023
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002024- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2025 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002026
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002027- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2028 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2029 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2030 and __imul__.
2031
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002032- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002033 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2034 is called.
2035
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002036- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2037 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2038 interpreter was compiled.
2039
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002040- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2041 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2042 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002043 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002044 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2045 1, not 2.
2046
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002047- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2048 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2049 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2050 limit.
2051
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002052- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2053 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2054 bug #623464.
2055
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002056- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2057 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2058 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2059 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2060
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002061Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002062-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002063
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002064- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2065
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002066- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2067 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2068 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2069 with Python 2.3a2.
2070
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002071- os.path exposes getctime.
2072
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002073- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002074 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002075 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002076 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002077 unit tests of floating point results.
2078
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002079- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2080 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2081 has been increased.
2082
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002083- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2084 executed.
2085
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002086- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2087 postinstallation script.
2088
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002089- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2090 test the current module.
2091
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002092- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002093 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2094 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2095 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2096 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2097
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002098- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002099 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002100 Ward's Optik package.
2101
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002102- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2103 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2104 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2105 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2106
2107- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2108 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002109 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002110
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002111- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2112 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2113 shelf are binary pickles.
2114
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002115- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2116 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2117
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002118- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2119 modules are iterators now.
2120
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002121- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2122 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2123 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2124 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2125 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2126 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002127
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002128- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2129 with their entity value.
2130
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002131- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2132
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002133- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2134 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002135
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002136- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2137 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002138 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002139
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002140- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2141 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2142 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2143 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2144 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2145 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2146 main():
2147
2148 import locale
2149 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2150
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002151- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2152 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2153
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002154- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2155 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2156 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2157 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2158 to the new standard.
2159
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002160- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2161 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2162 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2163 an extension to the database.
2164
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002165- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2166 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2167 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2168 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002169 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002170
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002171- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002172 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002173
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002174- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2175 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2176 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2177 bounded integers.
2178
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002179- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2180 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2181 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2182 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2183 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2184 in existence.
2185
2186 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2187 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2188 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2189 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2190 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2191 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2192
2193 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2194 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2195 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2196 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2197
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002198- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2199 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2200 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2201
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002202- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2203
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002204- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2205 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2206 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2207 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2208
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002209- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2210 argument.
2211
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002212- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2213 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2214 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2215 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2216 [SF patch 560794].
2217
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002218- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2219 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2220 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002221 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2222 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2223 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002224
2225- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2226 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002227
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002228- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2229 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2230 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2231 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002232
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002233- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2234 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2235 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2236 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2237 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2238
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002239- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002240
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002241- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2242
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002243- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2244 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2245 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2246 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2247 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2248 identical to None.
2249
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002250- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2251 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2252 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2253 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2254 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2255 results now.
2256
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002257- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2258 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2259
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002260- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2261 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2262 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2263 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2264 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2265 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2266 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2267 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2268
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002269- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2270
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002271- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2272 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2273
2274- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2275 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2276 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2277 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2278 and other systems.
2279
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002280- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2281 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2282 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2283 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 +00002284 work well with these.
2285
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002286- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2287
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002288- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002289 connections.
2290
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002291- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2292 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2293 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2294
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002295- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2296 sets
2297
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002298- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2299 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2300 name.
2301
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002302- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2303 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2304 passed in.
2305
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002306- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002307 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002308 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2309 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002310
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002311- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2312
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002313- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2314
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002315- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2316 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2317 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2318
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002319- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2320 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2321 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2322 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002323 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002324
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002325- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002326 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002327 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002328
2329- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2330 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2331 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2332
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002333- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002334 the value of its expression argument.
2335
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002336- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2337 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2338 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2339
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002340- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2341 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2342 skipstone browser was included.
2343
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002344- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2345 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2346
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002347Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002348-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002349
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002350- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2351 names in addition to accepting file names.
2352
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002353- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2354 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2355 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2356 still used and useful.)
2357
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002358- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2359 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2360 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2361 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002362
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002363- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2364 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2365 the generated binary.
2366
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002367Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002368-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002369
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002370- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2371
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002372- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2373 except in the hands of experts.
2374
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002375- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002376 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2377 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2378 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002379
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002380- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2381 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2382 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2383 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2384 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2385 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2386 builds.
2387
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002388- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2389 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2390 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2391 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2392 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2393 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2394 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2395 new type.
2396
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002397- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002398
2399 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2400 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2401 positive infinities.
2402
2403 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2404 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2405 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2406 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2407 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2408 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2409 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2410
2411 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2412
2413 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2414
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002415- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2416 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2417 size of the executable.
2418
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002419- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2420 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2421 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2422 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002423
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002424- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2425
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002426- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2427 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2428 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002429
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002430- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2431 well as Unix.
2432
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002433- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2434 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2435 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2436 modules in the README file for details.
2437
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002438C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002439-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002440
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002441- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2442 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002443 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002444 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002445 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002446
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002447- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2448 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2449 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2450 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2451 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2452 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002453 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002454 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2455 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2456 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2457 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2458 aligned.)
2459
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002460- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2461 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2462 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2463
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002464- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2465 level.
2466
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002467- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2468 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2469 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2470 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2471 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2472
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002473- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2474 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2475 code.
2476
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002477- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2478 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2479 adjusting for negative indices.
2480
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002481- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2482 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2483 object.
2484
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002485- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2486 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2487 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2488
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002489- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2490 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002491
2492- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2493
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002494- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2495 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2496 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2497 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2498
2499- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2500
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002501- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002502
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002503- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002504 without going through the buffer API.
2505
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002506- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002507
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002508- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2509 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2510 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2511 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2512
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002513- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2514 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2515
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002516- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002517 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2518
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002519New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002520-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002521
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002522- OpenVMS is now supported.
2523
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002524- AtheOS is now supported.
2525
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002526- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2527
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002528- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2529
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002530Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002531-----
2532
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002533- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2534 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2535 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002536
2537Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002538-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002539
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002540- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2541 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2542 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2543 bugs.
2544 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002545 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002546 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2547 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002548 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002549
2550- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002551 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002552
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002553- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2554 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2555
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002556- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2557 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002558 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002559 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2560
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002561- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2562 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2563 use files" uninstall option).
2564
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002565- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2566
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002567- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2568 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2569
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002570- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2571 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2572 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2573
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002574- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2575 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2576 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2577 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2578 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002579 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2580 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2581 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002582
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002583- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002584 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002585 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2586 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2587 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2588 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2589 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2590 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2591 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2592 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2593 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2594 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2595 work around.
2596
2597- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2598 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2599 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2600 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2601 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2602 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2603 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2604 specified with O_CREAT too).
2605
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002606Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002607----
2608
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002609- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002610
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002611- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2612 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2613 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2614
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002615- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2616 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2617 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2618
2619- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2620 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2621 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2622 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2623 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2624 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2625 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2626 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002627
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002628- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2629 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2630 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002631
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002632- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2633 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2634 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2635 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2636 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002637
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002638- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2639 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2640 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002641
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002642- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2643 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002644
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002645- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2646 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2647 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2648 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2649 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002650
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002651- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2652 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2653 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2654
2655- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2656 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2657 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002658
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002659- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2660 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2661 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2662 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002663 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002664
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002665- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2666 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002667
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002668- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2669 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002670
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002671- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002672 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002673 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2674 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002675
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002676
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002677What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002678===============================
2679
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002680*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2681
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002682Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002683--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002684
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002685- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2686 with a custom metaclass.
2687
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002688Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002689-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002690
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002691- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2692 are proxies.
2693
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002694Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002695-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002696
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002697- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2698 very short strings.
2699
2700- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2701 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2702 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2703 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2704 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2705
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002706Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002707-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002708
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002709- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2710 close or delete time).
2711
2712- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2713 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2714
2715- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2716
2717- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002718 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002719
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002720Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002721-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002722
2723Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002724-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002725
2726C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002727-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002728
2729New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002730-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002731
2732Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002733-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002734
2735Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002736-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002737
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002738- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2739
2740- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2741 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2742
2743- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2744 deleted at process exit time.
2745
2746- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2747 in backslash.
2748
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002749Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002750----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002751
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002752- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2753 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2754 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2755
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002756
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002757What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002758===========================
2759
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002760*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2761
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002762Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002763--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002764
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002765- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2766 been extensively updated. See
2767
2768 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2769
2770 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2771
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002772- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2773 deleted!
2774
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002775- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2776 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2777 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2778 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2779 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2780
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002781- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2782
2783 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2784 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2785
2786 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2787 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2788 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2789 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2790 supported anyway.
2791
2792 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2793 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2794
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002795- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2796 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2797 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2798 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2799 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002800
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002801- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2802 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2803 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2804
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002805Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002806-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002807
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002808- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2809 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2810 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2811 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2812 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2813 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002814 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2815 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2816 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2817 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002818
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002819- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2820 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2821 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2822
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002823Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002824-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002825
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002826- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2827
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002828Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002829-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002830
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002831- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2832 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2833 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2834 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2835 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2836 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2837
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002838- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2839
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002840- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2841
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002842- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2843
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002844- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2845 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2846 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2847
2848- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2849
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002850Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002851-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002852
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002853- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2854 off a search on Google.
2855
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002856Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002857-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002858
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002859- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2860 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2861 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2862 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2863 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2864 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2865 other platforms should do likewise.
2866
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002867- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2868 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2869 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2870
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002871C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002872-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002873
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002874- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2875 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2876 producing key-value pairs.
2877
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002878- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002879 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002880 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2881 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2882 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2883 previously went unchallenged.
2884
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002885New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002886-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002887
2888Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002889-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002890
2891Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002892-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002893
2894Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002895----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002896
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002897- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2898 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002899
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002900- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2901 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2902 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2903 home.
2904
2905
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002906What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002907===========================
2908
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002909*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2910
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002911Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002912--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002913
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002914- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2915 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002916
2917 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002918 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002919
2920 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2921 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002922 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002923 This needs to be documented.
2924
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002925- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2926 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2927
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002928- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2929 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2930 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2931
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002932- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2933 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2934
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002935- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2936 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2937 class forbids it).
2938
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002939- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2940 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2941 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2942
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002943- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2944
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002945Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002946-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002947
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002948- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2949 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002950 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002951
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002952- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2953 (like 1 + '').
2954
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002955Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002956-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002957
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002958- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2959 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2960 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2961 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002962 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002963 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2964
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002965- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2966 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2967 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2968 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2969
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002970- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2971 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002972 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2973 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2974 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002975
2976- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2977 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002978
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002979- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2980 bytes on its input.
2981
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002982Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002983-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002984
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002985- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002986 convenience function.
2987
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002988- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2989 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2990 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002991 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2992 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2993 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2994 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2995 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2996 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002997
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002998- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2999 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3000 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3001 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3002
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003003- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3004 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3005 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3006
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003007- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3008 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3009 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3010 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3011
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003012- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3013 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003015 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3016 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3017 new -l and -e options.
3018
3019- statcache is now deprecated.
3020
3021- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3022 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003023 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003024 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3025 time properly taken into account.
3026
3027- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3028 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3029 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3030 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3031
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003032Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003033-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003034
3035Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003036-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003037
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003038- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3039 is built with libdb3 if available.
3040
3041- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3042
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003043C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003044-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003045
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003046- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3047 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3048 PySequence_Size().
3049
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003050- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3051
3052- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3053 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3054 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3055
3056- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3057 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3058
3059- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3060 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3061
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003062New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003063-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003064
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003065- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3066 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3067
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003068- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3069 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3070
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003071- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3072
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003073Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003074-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003075
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003076- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3077 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3078
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003079Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003081
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003082Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003083----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003084
3085- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3086 removed completely in the next release.
3087
3088- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3089 OSX.
3090
3091- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3092 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3093
3094- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3095
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003096
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003097What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003098===========================
3099
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003100*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3101
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003102Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003103--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003104
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003105- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003106 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003107 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003108 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3109 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003110 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3111 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003112 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3113 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003114
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003115- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3116 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3117
3118- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3119 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3120
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003121Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003122-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003123
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003124- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3125 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3126 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3127 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3128 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3129 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3130 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3131 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3132
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003133- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3134 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3135 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3136 example).
3137
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003138- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003139 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003140 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003141 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003142
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003143- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3144 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3145 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003146 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003147
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003148- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3149 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3150 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3151 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3152 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3153 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3154
3155 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3156
3157 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3158
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003159Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003161
3162- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3163
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003164- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3165
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003166- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3167 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003168
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003169- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3170 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3171 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3172 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3173 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3174 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003175 attributes.
3176
3177- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3178 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3179 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003180
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003181- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3182 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3183 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003184
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003185- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3186 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3187 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003188 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3189 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3190
3191- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3192 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003193
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003194Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003195-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003196
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003197- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3198 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3199
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003200- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3201 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3202 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3203 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3204
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003205- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3206 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3207 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3208 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3209
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003210 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3211 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3212 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3213 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3214 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3215 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3216 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3217 without losing information).
3218
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003219- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003220 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3221 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3222 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3223 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3224 module).
3225
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003226 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003227 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3228 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3229 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3230 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003231
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003232- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003233 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3234 encoding.
3235
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003236- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3237 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3238
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003240 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3241
3242- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3243 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3244 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3245 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3246
3247- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3248
3249- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3250 ON, and OFF.
3251
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003252- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3253 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3254
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003255Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003256-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003257
3258- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3259 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3260 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003261
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003262- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3263 been added: -X and -E.
3264
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003265Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003266-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003267
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003268- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3269 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3270
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003271C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003272-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003273
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003274- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3275 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3276 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3277 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3278 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3279
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003280- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3281 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3282 as long) arguments.
3283
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003284- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3285 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3286 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3287 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3288 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3289 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3290
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003291- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3292 input.
3293
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003294New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003296
3297Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003299
3300Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003301-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003302
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003303- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3304 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3305 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3306
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003307- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3308 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3309 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003310 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003311
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3313 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3314 import signal
3315 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003316
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003318 while 1:
3319 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003320 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003321 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3322 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3323 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3324 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003325
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003326
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003327What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3328===========================
3329
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3331
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003332Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003333--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003334
3335- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3336 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3337 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3338
3339- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3340 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3341 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3342 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3343 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3344 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3345 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003346
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003347- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003348 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003349 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3350 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3351 associate a docstring with a property.
3352
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003353- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3354 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3355 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3356 other built-in object types.
3357
3358- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3359 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3360 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3361 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3362 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3363
3364- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3365 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3366
3367- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3368 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003369 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003370 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3371 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3372 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3373 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3374 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3375
3376- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3377 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3378 class.
3379
3380- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3381 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3382 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3383 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3384
3385- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3386 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3387 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3388 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3389
3390- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3391 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3392
3393- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3394 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3395 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3396 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3397 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003398 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003399 with the same value as s.
3400
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003401- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3402
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003403Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003405
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003406- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3407
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003408- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3409 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3410 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3411 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3412 objects.
3413
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003414- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3415 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003416 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3417 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3418
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003419- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3420 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3421 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3422
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003423Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003424-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003425
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003426- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3427 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3428 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3429 by the instances.
3430
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003431- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3432 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3433 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3434
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003435- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3436 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3437 before the entire comparison is complete.
3438
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003439- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3440 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3441 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3442
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003443- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3444 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3445 getwriter().
3446
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003447- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3448 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3449
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003450- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003451 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3452 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3453
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003454- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3455 iterable object.
3456
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003457- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3458 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003459
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003460- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3461 authentication.
3462
3463- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3464 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003465
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003466- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003467 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3468 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3469 a sample driver.)
3470
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003471Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003472-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003473
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003474- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3475 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3476 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3477 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3478 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3479 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3480 kernel has large file support.
3481
3482- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3483 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3484 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3485 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3486 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3487
3488- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3489 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3490 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3491
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003492C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003494
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003495- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3496 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3497
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003498New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003500
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003501- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3502 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3503
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003504Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003506
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003507- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3508 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3509 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3510 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3511 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3512
3513- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3514 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3515 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3516 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3517
3518- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3519 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3520
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003521Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003522-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003523
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003524- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003525 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3526 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003527
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003528
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003529What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3530===========================
3531
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3533
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003534Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003535----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003536
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003537- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3538 big to represent as a C double.
3539
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003540- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3541 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3542 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3543 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3544 restriction).
3545
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003546- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3547 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3548 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3549 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3550 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3551
3552 >>> dir([])
3553 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3554 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3555 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3556 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3557 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3558 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3559 'reverse', 'sort']
3560
3561 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3562
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003563- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003564 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3565 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3566 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3567 OverflowError exception.
3568
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003569- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003570 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003571 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3572 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3573 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3574 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3575 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003576 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003577 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3578 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3579
3580 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3581 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3582 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3583 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003584
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003585- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003586 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3587 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3588 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3589 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3590 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3591 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3592 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3593 once it is created.
3594
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003595- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3596 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3597 (key, value) pairs.
3598
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003599- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003600 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3601 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3602
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003603- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3604 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3605 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3606 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3607 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003608
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003609- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003610 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3611 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3612
3613 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3614
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003615- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003616 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3617
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003618Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003620
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003621- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003622 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3623 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003624
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003625- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3626 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3627 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3628 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3629 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3630 in this area anymore).
3631
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003632- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3633 threading.Timer.
3634
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003635- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3636 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3637
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003638- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003639 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3640
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003641- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003642 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3643 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3644 converted to Python longs.
3645
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003646- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003647 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3648
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003649- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3650 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3651 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3652
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003653Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003654-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003655
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003656- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3657 division operators as per PEP 238.
3658
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003659Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003660-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003661
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003662- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3663 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3664 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3665 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3666
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003667C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003668-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003669
3670- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003671
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003672- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3673 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003674 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003675
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3677 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003678 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003680
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003681- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003682 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3683 module:
3684
3685 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003686
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003687 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3688 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003689
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003690 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3691 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003692
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003693 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3694
3695 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3696
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003697- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003698 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3699 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3700 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003701
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003702New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003703-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003704
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003705- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3706 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3707 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3708 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3709 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003710
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003711Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003712-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003713
3714Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003715-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003716
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003717- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3718 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3719 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3720 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003721 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3722 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3723 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3724 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3725 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003726
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003727- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003728 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3729
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003730
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003731What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3732===========================
3733
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3735
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003736Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003738
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003739- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3740 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3741
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003742- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3743 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3744 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003745
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003746- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3747 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3748 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3749 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003750
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003751- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3752
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003754
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003755Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003756-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003757
3758- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003759 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003760 the module docstring for details.
3761
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003762Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003764
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003765- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003766 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3767 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3768 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003769
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003770- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3771 Nick Mathewson.
3772
3773Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003775
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003776- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3777 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3778 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3779 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3780 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3781 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3782 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3783 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3784
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003785- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3786 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3787 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3788 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3789
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003790- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3791 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3792 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3793 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3794 come a long way).
3795
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003796- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3797 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3798 write filters for these warnings).
3799
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003800- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3801 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3802 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3803 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3804 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3805
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003806- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3807 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3808 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3809 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3810 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3811 older distribution.
3812
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003813Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003814-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003815
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003816- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3817 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003818 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003819
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003820- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3821 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3822 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3823
3824- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3825
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003826- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3827
3828- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3829
3830- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3831
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003832- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003833
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003834- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3835
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003836New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003838
3839C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003841
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003842- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3843 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3844 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3845 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3846 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3847 against buffer overruns.
3848
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003849- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003850 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3851 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003852 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3853 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3854 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3855
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003856- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3857 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3858 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3859 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3860 deprecated.
3861
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003862Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003863-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003864
3865- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3866 relevant is found.
3867
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003868
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003869What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003870===========================
3871
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3873
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003874Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003875----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003876
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003877- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3878 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3879 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3880 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3881 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3882 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3883 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3884 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003885 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003886 repaired.
3887
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003888- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003889 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003890 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3891 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3892 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3893 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3894 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3895 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3896 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3897 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3898
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003899- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3900 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3901 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3902 leading BMO character).
3903
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003904- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3905 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3906 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3907
3908 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3909 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3910 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003911
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003912 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3913 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3914 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3915 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3916 for various simple to use conversions.
3917
3918 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3919 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3920
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003921 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3922 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3923 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3924 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3925 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3926 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3927 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3928 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3929 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3930 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3931 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3932 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3933 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3934 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3935 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003936
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003937- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3938 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3939 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003940 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003941 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003942
3943 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003944 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3945 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3946 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3947 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3948 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003949 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3950 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003951
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003952 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3953 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3954 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003955 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003956
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003957- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3958 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3959 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3960 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3961 floating arithmetic,
3962
3963 x = 9007199254740992.0
3964 print long(x)
3965
3966 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3967 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3968 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3969 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3970 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3971 functions are of good quality).
3972
3973 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3974 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3975 algorithms to break.
3976
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003977- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3978 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3979 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3980 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3981 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3982 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3983 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3984 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3985 order.
3986
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003987- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3988 operation along the most common code paths.
3989
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003990- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3991 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3992
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003993- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3994 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3995 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3996 {}.update(UserDict())
3997
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003998- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3999 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4000 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4001 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4002 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4003 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4004 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4005 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4006
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004007- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004008 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004010 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004011 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4012 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004013 join() method of strings
4014 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004015 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4016 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004018 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004019
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004020- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4021 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4022
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004023- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4024 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4025
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004026- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4027 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4028 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4029 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4030
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004031- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4032 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004033 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004034 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4035 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004036
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004037- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4038
4039
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004040Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004041-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004042
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004043- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004044 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004045 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4046 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4047
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004048- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4049 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4050
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004051- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4052 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4053 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4054 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4055
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004056- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4057 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4058 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4059
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004060- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4061
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004062- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4063
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004064- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4065 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4066 that are still imported into string.py).
4067
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004068- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4069
4070- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4071 Now it does.
4072
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004073- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4074
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004075- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4076 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4077 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4078 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4079 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004080 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4081 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004082
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004083- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4084 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4085 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4086 'help(object)'.
4087
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004088Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004089-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004090
4091- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004092 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004093 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4094 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4095
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004096- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004097 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4098 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004099
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004100C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004101-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004102
4103- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4104 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004105
4106----
4107
4108**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**