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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
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000010*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000015- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
16 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
17 @staticmethod
18 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000019 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000020
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000021- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
22 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
23 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
24 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
25 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
26 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
27 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
28 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
29 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
30 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
31 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
32
33 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
34 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
35 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
36 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
37 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
38 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
39 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
40
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000041- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
42 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
43
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000044- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000045 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000046
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000047- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000048 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000049 which was missing for no apparent reason.
50
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000051- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000052 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
53 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
54
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000055- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
56 types that support garbage collection.
57
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000058- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
59
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000060- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
61 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
62 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
63 Jython.
64
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000065- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
66
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +000067- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
68 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
69
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +000070- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
71 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
72 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +000073
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +000074- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
75 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
76 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
77
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000078Extension modules
79-----------------
80
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +000081- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
82
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000083Library
84-------
85
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +000086- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
87 TIS-620
88
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +000089- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
90 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
91 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
92 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
93 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
94 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
95 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
96 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
97 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
98 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
99
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000100- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
101
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000102- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
103 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
104 same as when the argument is omitted).
105 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
106
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000107- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
108
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000109- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
110 schemes are offered.
111
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000112- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
113
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000114- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
115 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
116 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
117
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000118- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
119
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000120- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
121 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
122
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000123- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
124 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
125 when dummy_threading is being used.
126
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000127- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
128 from a tarfile.
129
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000130- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000131 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000132
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000133- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
134 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
135 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
136 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
137
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000138- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
139 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
140
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000141- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
142 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
143 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
144 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
145 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
146 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
147 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
148 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
149 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
150 by some other method in progress).
151
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000152- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
153 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
154 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000155
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000156- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
157
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000158- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
159 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
160 AM Kuchling.
161
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000162- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
163 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
164 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
165
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000166- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
167 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
168 instead of unsigned.
169
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000170- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000171 no longer part of the public API.
172
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000173- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
174 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
175 string methods of the same name).
176
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000177- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
178 SF patch 982681.
179
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000180- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000181 SF patch 945642.
182
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000183- doctest unittest integration improvements:
184
185 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
186
187 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
188 DocTestSuites.
189
190- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
191 that provide thread-local data.
192
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000193- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
194 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
195
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000196- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
197
198- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
199 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
200 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
201
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000202- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
203
204 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
205 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
206 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000207
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000208 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
209 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
210 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
211 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
212
213 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
214 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
215
216 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
217 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
218 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
219 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
220
221 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
222 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
223 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
224 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
225 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
226
227 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
228 wrapping help output.
229
230 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
231 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
232 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000233
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000234Tools/Demos
235-----------
236
237Build
238-----
239
240C API
241-----
242
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000243- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
244 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
245 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
246 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
247 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
248 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
249 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
250 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
251 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
252 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
253 its visible semantics have not changed.
254
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000255- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
256 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
257
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000258Documentation
259-------------
260
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000261- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000262
263 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
264 assigning thier values
265
266 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
267
268 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
269
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000270- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000271
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000272New platforms
273-------------
274
275Tests
276-----
277
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000278- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000279 platforms that use the Makefile.
280
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000281- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
282 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
283 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
284
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000285Windows
286-------
287
288Mac
289---
290
291
292
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000293What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
294=================================
295
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000296*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000297
298Core and builtins
299-----------------
300
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000301- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
302 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
303 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
304 objects now (one object instead of three).
305
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000306- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
307 Windows DLLs.
308
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000309- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
310 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000311
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000312- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
313 a new .pyc magic.
314
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000315- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
316 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
317 be there.
318
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000319- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
320 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
321 the LC_NUMERIC category.
322
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000323- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
324 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
325 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
326
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000327- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
328
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000329- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
330 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
331 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000332
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000333- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
334 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
335
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000336- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
337
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000338- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000339 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000340
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000341- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
342
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000343- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
344
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000345- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
346 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
347
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000348- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
349 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
350 Fixes bug #858016 .
351
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000352- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
353 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
354 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
355
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000356- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
357 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
358 improves their performance (about 35%).
359
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000360- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
361 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
362 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
363
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000364- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
365 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
366 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
367 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
368
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000369- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
370 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
371 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
372 length is not known).
373
374- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
375 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000376 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
377 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000378 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
379
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000380- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
381 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
382
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000383- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
384 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
385 keyword arguments.
386
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000387- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
388 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
389 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
390
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000391- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
392 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
393 cases.
394
395- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
396 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
397 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
398 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
399 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
400 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
401 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
402 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
403 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
404 a release build.
405
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000406- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
407 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
408
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000409- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000410 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000411
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000412- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
413 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
414 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
415 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
416 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
417 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
418 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
419 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
420 destroyed.
421
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000422- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
423 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
424 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
425 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
426 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
427 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
428 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
429 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
430
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000431- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
432 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
433 character other than a space.
434
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000435- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
436 by the function object or by the method object, the function
437 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
438 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
439 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
440 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
441 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
442 attributes with the same name.
443
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000444- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
445 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
446 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
447 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
448 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
449 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
450 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
451 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
452 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
453 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
454 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
455 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
456 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
457 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000458
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000459- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
460 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
461 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
462 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
463 This has been repaired.
464
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000465- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
466
467- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
468
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000469- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
470 over a sequence.
471
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000472- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000473 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000474
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000475- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
476
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000477- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
478 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
479 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
480 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
481 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
482 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
483 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
484 records with equal keys is unchanged).
485
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000486- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
487 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
488 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
489
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000490- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
491 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
492 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
493 freelist.
494
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000495- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
496 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
497
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000498- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
499 number.
500
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000501- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
502 a TypeError exception.
503
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000504- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
505 820195.
506
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000507- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
508 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
509 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
510
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000511- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000512 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
513 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000514
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000515- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
516 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
517 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
518
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000519- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
520 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000521 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000522
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000523- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000524 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
525 the first call.
526
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000527
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000528Extension modules
529-----------------
530
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000531- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
532 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
533
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000534- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
535 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
536 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
537 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
538 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
539 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
540 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000541
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000542- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
543
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000544- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
545
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000546- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
547 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
548
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000549- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
550 fewer false positives.
551
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000552- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
553 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
554
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000555- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000556 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
557
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000558- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000559 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000560 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
561 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
562 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000563
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000564- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
565 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
566 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
567 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
568
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000569- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
570 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
571 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
572 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
573 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
574 #897625.
575
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000576- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
577 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
578
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000579- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
580 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
581 and pops on either side of the deque.
582
583- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
584 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
585
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000586- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
587 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
588 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
589 other functions that expect a function argument.
590
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000591- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
592
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000593- os.getsid was added.
594
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000595- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
596 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
597 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
598
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000599- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
600
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000601- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
602
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000603- readline.clear_history was added.
604
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000605- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
606
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000607- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
608
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000609- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
610
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000611- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
612
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000613- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
614
615- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
616
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000617- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
618
619- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
620
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000621- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
622 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
623 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
624
625- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
626 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
627 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
628 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
629 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
630 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
631 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
632
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000633- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
634 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
635 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
636 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000637
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000638- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000639 iterators from a single iterable.
640
641- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
642 of raising a TypeError exception.
643
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000644- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
645 as parameter.
646
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000647Library
648-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000649
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000650- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
651 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
652 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000653
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000654- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
655 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
656 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000657
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000658- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000659
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000660- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
661 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000662
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000663- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
664 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
665
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000666- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
667
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000668- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000669 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000670
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000671- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
672 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
673
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000674- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
675
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000676- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
677 on cygwin and mingw32.
678
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000679- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
680
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000681- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
682 module.
683
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000684- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
685 installation scheme for all platforms.
686
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000687- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000688 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000689
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000690- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
691 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
692 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
693
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000694- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
695 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
696 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
697
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000698- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
699
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000700- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
701
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000702- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
703 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
704
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000705- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
706 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
707 type pattern with the same value exists.
708
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000709- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
710 when run from the command prompt).
711
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000712- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
713 not taken into consideration when caching value.
714
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000715- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
716 default sort).
717
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000718- Added global runctx function to profile module
719
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000720- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
721
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000722- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
723
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000724- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
725
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000726- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000727 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
728 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
729 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
730 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
731 accordingly.
732
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000733- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
734 decoding standards.
735
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000736- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
737 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
738 called for all requests.
739
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000740- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
741 they are passed to the compiler.
742
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000743- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
744 indent, width and depth.
745
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000746- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
747 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
748
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000749- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
750 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
751
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000752- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
753
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000754- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
755
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000756- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
757
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000758- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
759 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
760
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000761- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000762 for better performance.
763
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000764- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000765
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000766- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
767 a string).
768
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000769- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
770
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000771- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
772
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000773- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
774
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000775- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
776
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000777- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
778 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
779 list of fieldnames.
780
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000781- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
782 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
783
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000784- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
785
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000786- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
787 empty lists.
788
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000789- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
790 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
791 and shelves.
792
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000793- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
794 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
795
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000796- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000797 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
798 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000799
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000800- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
801 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000802 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000803
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000804- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000805 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
806 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
807
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000808- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
809 and removed in Py2.4.
810
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000811- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
812
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000813- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
814
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000815Tools/Demos
816-----------
817
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000818- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
819 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
820
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000821- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
822
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000823- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
824 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
825 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
826 destination in situations where both files are given.
827
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000828- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
829 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
830 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
831 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
832
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000833- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
834
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000835- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
836 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
837 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
838 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
839 now.
840
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000841- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
842 in effect
843
844- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
845 C-c C-h
846
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000847- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
848 -d option was given.
849
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000850Build
851-----
852
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000853- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
854 build under OS X.
855
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000856- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
857 --enable-profiling.
858
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000859- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
860 is configured --with-tsc.
861
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000862- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
863 on AMD64.
864
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000865- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
866 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
867
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000868- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
869 removed.
870
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000871- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
872 supported (see PEP 11).
873
874- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
875
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000876- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
877
878- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
879 (see PEP 11).
880
881- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
882 sizeof(char) must be 1.
883
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000884C API
885-----
886
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000887- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
888 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
889 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
890
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000891- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
892 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
893 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
894 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
895
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000896- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
897 generator objects.
898
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000899- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
900 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000901 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
902 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000903
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000904- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
905 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
906
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000907- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
908 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
909 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
910 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
911 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
912
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000913- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
914 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
915 about 10% faster.
916
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000917- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
918 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
919
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000920- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
921 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
922 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
923 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
924
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000925Windows
926-------
927
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000928- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
929 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
930 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
931 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
932
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000933- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
934 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
935 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
936
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000937
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000938What's New in Python 2.3 final?
939===============================
940
941*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
942
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000943IDLE
944----
945
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000946- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
947 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
948 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
949 context-menu actions.
950
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000951- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
952 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
953 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
954 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
955 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
956 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
957 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
958 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
959 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
960
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000961
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000962What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
963=============================================
964
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000965*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000966
967Core and builtins
968-----------------
969
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000970- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000971 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000972 comment at the end are still unsupported.
973
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000974Extension modules
975-----------------
976
977- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
978 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
979 than once. This has been fixed.
980
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000981- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
982 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
983 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
984 call.
985
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000986- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
987
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000988Library
989-------
990
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000991- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
992 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
993
994- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
995 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
996 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
997 restored.
998
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000999IDLE
1000----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001001
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001002- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001003
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001004Build
1005-----
1006
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001007- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1008 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1009
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001010C API
1011-----
1012
1013Windows
1014-------
1015
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001016- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1017 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1018
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001019- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1020
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001021Mac
1022---
1023
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001024- Various fixes to pimp.
1025
1026- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1027
1028- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1029 more problems than it solves.
1030
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001031
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001032What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1033=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001034
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001035*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1036
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001037Core and builtins
1038-----------------
1039
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001040- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1041 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1042
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001043- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1044 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001045 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001046
1047- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1048 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1049 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001050 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001051
1052- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1053 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001054
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001055- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1056 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1057 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1058
1059- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001060 770247.
1061
1062- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001063
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001064Extension modules
1065-----------------
1066
1067- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1068 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1069
1070- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1071
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001072- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1073
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001074- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1075 contained within the _strptime module.
1076
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001077- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1078 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1079
1080- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001081 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1082
1083- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1084 the find_class attribute, if present.
1085
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001086- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001087
1088 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1089 (SF bug 763298).
1090
1091 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001092 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1093 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1094 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001095
1096 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1097
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001098Library
1099-------
1100
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001101- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1102
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001103- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1104 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1105 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1106 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1107 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1108 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1109 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1110 or Tester().
1111
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001112- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1113 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1114 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1115 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1116 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1117 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1118 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1119 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1120 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001121
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001122 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001123
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001124- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1125 weren't before was an oversight.
1126
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001127- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1128 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1129
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001130- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1131 when there are no lines.
1132
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001133- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1134 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1135
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001136- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1137 to child processes.
1138
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001139- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1140
1141- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1142
1143- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1144 xmlrpclib.
1145
1146- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1147 responses.
1148
1149- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1150 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1151
1152- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1153 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1154 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1155
1156- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1157 used as patterns.
1158
1159- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1160 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1161 than Tk 8.3.
1162
1163- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1164
1165- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001166
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001167Tools/Demos
1168-----------
1169
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001170- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1171
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001172- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1173
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001174- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001175
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001176Build
1177-----
1178
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001179- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1180
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001181- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1182
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001183- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1184 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001185
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001186- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1187 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1188 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001189
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001190C API
1191-----
1192
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001193- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1194 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1195
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001196Windows
1197-------
1198
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001199- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1200 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1201 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1202 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1203 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1204 Python exception ::
1205
1206 thread.error: can't start new thread
1207
1208 is raised now.
1209
1210- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1211 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1212 instead of from DLL teardown.
1213
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001214Mac
1215---
1216
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001217- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001218 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001219 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1220 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1221 the executable in the bundle.
1222
1223- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001224
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001225- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1226
1227- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1228 on Panther.
1229
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001230What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1231================================
1232
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001233*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001234
1235Core and builtins
1236-----------------
1237
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001238- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1239 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1240 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1241 with the -i option.
1242
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001243- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1244 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1245
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001246- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1247 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1248
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001249- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1250 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1251 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1252 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1253 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1254 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1255 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1256 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1257 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1258 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1259 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1260 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1261 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001262
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001263- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1264 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1265 embedded in a lambda expression.
1266
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001267- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1268 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1269 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1270 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1271 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1272
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001273- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1274 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1275 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1276
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001277- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1278 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1279
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001280- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1281 It's writable again.
1282
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001283- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1284 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1285 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001286 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001287
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001288- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1289 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1290 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1291
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001292Extension modules
1293-----------------
1294
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001295- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1296 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1297
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001298- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1299 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1300 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1301 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1302
1303- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1304 collection.
1305
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001306- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1307 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1308 unique within a single program run.
1309
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001310- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1311 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1312
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001313- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1314 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1315
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001316- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1317 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001318
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001319- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1320
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001321- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1322 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1323
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001324- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1325 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1326 for many BSD-derived systems.
1327
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001328
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001329Library
1330-------
1331
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001332- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1333 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1334 primary ones:
1335
1336 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1337 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1338 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1339
1340 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1341 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1342 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1343 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1344 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1345 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1346
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001347- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1348 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1349 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1350 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1351 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1352 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1353 argument.
1354
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001355- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1356 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1357 in the archive.
1358
1359- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1360 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1361
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001362- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1363 569574).
1364
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001365- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1366 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1367 no more.
1368
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001369- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1370 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1371 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1372 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1373 code coverage.
1374
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001375- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1376 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1377 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001378 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1379 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001380
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001381- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1382 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1383 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001384 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001385
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001386- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1387
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001388- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1389 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1390 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1391 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1392
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001393- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1394 handling.
1395
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001396- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1397 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1398
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001399- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1400 in socket.py.
1401
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001402- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1403
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001404- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1405 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1406 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1407 opener with proxy support.
1408
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001409- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1410
1411- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1412
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001413Tools/Demos
1414-----------
1415
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001416- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1417
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001418- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1419
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001420- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1421 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001422
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001423- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1424 files.
1425
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001426Build
1427-----
1428
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001429- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001430 different root directory.
1431
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001432C API
1433-----
1434
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001435- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1436 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1437 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1438 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1439 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1440 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1441 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1442 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1443 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1444 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1445
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001446- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1447 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1448 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1449 from Python.
1450
1451
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001452New platforms
1453-------------
1454
1455None this time.
1456
1457Tests
1458-----
1459
1460- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1461 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1462
1463Windows
1464-------
1465
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001466- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1467
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001468- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1469 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1470 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1471 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1472 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1473 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1474 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1475 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1476 that's what it's for.
1477
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001478Mac
1479---
1480
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001481- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1482 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1483 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1484 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001485- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1486 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1487- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001488
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001489SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1490------------------------------------
1491
1492430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1493598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1494622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1495661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1496683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1497697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1498713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1499724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1500727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1501729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1502730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1503731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1504732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1505733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1506735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1507740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1508744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1509745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1510747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1511749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1512751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1513753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1514755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1515757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1516760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1517
1518
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001519What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1520================================
1521
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001522*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001523
1524Core and builtins
1525-----------------
1526
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001527- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1528 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1529
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001530- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1531 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1532 and cannot be strings).
1533
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001534- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1535 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1536 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1537 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1538
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001539- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1540 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1541 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1542 Python itself.
1543
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001544- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1545 the referenced object, if it has one.
1546
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001547- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1548 the thread started at
1549 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1550
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001551- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1552 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1553 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1554 placed on a list index.
1555
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001556- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1557 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1558 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1559 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1560
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001561- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1562 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1563 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1564 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1565 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1566 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1567 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1568
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001569- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1570 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1571 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1572 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1573 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1574
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001575- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1576 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001577
1578- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1579 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1580 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1581 #693195.)
1582
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001583- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1584 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001585
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001586- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001587 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001588 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1589 interpreter executions, would fail.
1590
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001591- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001592 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001593 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001594
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001595Extension modules
1596-----------------
1597
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001598- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1599 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1600 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1601 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1602
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001603- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1604 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1605
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001606- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1607 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1608 and Greg Chapman.)
1609
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001610- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1611 recursively.
1612
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001613- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001614 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1615 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1616 leaks.
1617
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001618- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1619
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001620- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1621 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1622 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1623 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1624 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1625 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1626 #705836.
1627
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001628- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001629 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1630
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001631- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1632 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1633 See SF bug #692416.
1634
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001635- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1636 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1637
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001638- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1639 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1640 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001641
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001642- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001643 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1644 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1645
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001646- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1647 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1648 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1649 timeouts to work properly.
1650
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001651Library
1652-------
1653
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001654- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1655 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1656 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1657 future release.
1658
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001659- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1660 for querying platform dependent features.
1661
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001662- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001663
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001664- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1665 pickle protocol versions.
1666
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001667- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1668 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1669 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1670
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001671- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1672
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001673- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1674 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1675 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1676 modules.
1677
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001678- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1679 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1680 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1681
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001682- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1683 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1684
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001685- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1686 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1687 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1688
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001689- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001690 MS Office extensions.
1691
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001692- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1693 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1694
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001695- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1696 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1697
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001698- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1699 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1700 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1701 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1702 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1703 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1704
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001705- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1706 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1707 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001708
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001709- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1710 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1711 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1712
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001713- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1714
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001715- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1716 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1717 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1718
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001719Tools/Demos
1720-----------
1721
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001722- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1723 See the module docstring for details.
1724
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001725Build
1726-----
1727
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001728- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1729 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001730
1731C API
1732-----
1733
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001734- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1735
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001736- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1737 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1738 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1739
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001740- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1741 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001742
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001743 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1744 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1745 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001746
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001747- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001748 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1749
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001750- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1751 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1752 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001753
1754New platforms
1755-------------
1756
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001757None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001758
1759Tests
1760-----
1761
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001762- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1763 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001764
1765Windows
1766-------
1767
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001768- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1769 function.
1770
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001771- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1772 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001773
1774Mac
1775---
1776
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001777- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1778 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001779
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001780- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1781 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001782
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001783- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1784 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1785 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001786
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001787- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001788 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1789 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001790
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001791- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1792 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001793
1794
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001795What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1796=================================
1797
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001798*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001799
1800Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001801-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001802
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001803- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1804 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1805 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1806
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001807- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1808 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1809 (SF patch #664376.)
1810
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001811- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1812 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1813 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1814 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1815 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1816 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001817 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001818
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001819- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1820 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1821 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1822 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001823 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001824
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001825- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1826 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1827 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1828 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1829 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1830 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1831 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1832 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1833 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1834 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1835 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1836
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001837- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1838 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1839 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1840 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1841 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1842 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1843
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001844- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1845 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1846
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001847- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1848 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1849 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1850 case.)
1851
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001852- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1853 passed as unicode strings.
1854
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001855- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1856 See SF bug #683467.
1857
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001858- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1859 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1860
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001861- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1862
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001863- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1864
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001865- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1866 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1867 arguments.
1868
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001869- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1870 See SF bug #667147.
1871
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001872- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001873 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001874 See SF bug #676155.
1875
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001876- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001877 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001878 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1879 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1880 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1881 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1882 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1883 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001884
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001885Extension modules
1886-----------------
1887
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001888- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1889 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1890 tp_as_number pointer.
1891
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001892- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1893 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1894 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1895 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1896 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1897
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001898- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1899
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001900- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1901
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001902- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001903 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001904 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1905 patch #678531.)
1906
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001907- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1908 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1909
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001910- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1911 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1912
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001913- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1914
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001915- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1916 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1917 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1918
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001919- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1920
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001921- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1922 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1923
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001924- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001925
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001926- datetime changes:
1927
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001928 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1929
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001930 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1931 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1932 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1933 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1934 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1935 now.
1936
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001937 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001938 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1939 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001940
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001941 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001942 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001943 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1944 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1945 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1946 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001947
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001948 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1949 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1950 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001951 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1952
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001953 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1954 by a later example coded by Guido.
1955
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001956 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001957 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1958 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1959 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001960 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1961 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1962
1963 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1964 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1965 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1966 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1967 tzinfo subclass instance.
1968
1969 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1970 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1971 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1972 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1973 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1974 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1975 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1976 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001977
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001978 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1979 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1980 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1981 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1982 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001983 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1984
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001985 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001986
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001987 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1988 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1989 as a naive datetime object.
1990
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001991 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1992 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1993 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1994
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001995 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1996 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1997 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1998 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1999 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2000 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2001 comparison.
2002
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002003 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2004 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2005 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2006 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002007 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002008
2009 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002010
2011 and ::
2012
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002013 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2014
2015 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2016 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2017 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2018 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2019
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002020 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2021 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2022 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2023 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2024 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2025
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002026 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2027 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002028 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2029 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002030
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002031Library
2032-------
2033
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002034- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2035 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2036
2037- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2038 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2039 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2040 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2041 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2042 See PEP 307 for details.
2043
2044- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2045 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2046
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002047- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2048 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002049 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002050 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2051 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002052 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002053
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002054- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2055 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2056
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002057- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2058 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2059 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2060
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002061- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2062
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002063- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2064 exception.
2065
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002066- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2067 class.
2068
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002069- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2070 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2071 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2072
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002073- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2074 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2075
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002076- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002077 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2078 See SF bug #659228.
2079
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002080- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2081 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2082 See SF patch #651082.
2083
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002084- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002085
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002086- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2087 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2088
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002089- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002090 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002091
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002092- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2093 DOS paths from other platforms.
2094
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002095Tools/Demos
2096-----------
2097
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002098- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2099 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2100 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2101 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2102 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2103 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2104 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2105 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2106 example:
2107
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002108 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2109 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002110
2111 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2112
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002113
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002114Build
2115-----
2116
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002117- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2118 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2119 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002120 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2121
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002122 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2123
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002124- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2125 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2126 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2127 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2128 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2129 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2130 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2131 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2132 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2133
2134- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2135 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2136 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2137 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2138
2139- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2140 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2141
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002142C API
2143-----
2144
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002145- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2146 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002147
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002148- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2149 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2150 tp_as_number pointer.
2151
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002152- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2153 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2154 (SF #681367)
2155
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002156- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2157 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2158 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2159 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002160
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002161Tests
2162-----
2163
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002164- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002165 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2166 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2167 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2168 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2169 pydoc.)
2170
2171- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2172
2173- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002174
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002175Windows
2176-------
2177
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002178- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2179 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2180 time).
2181
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002182- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2183 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2184
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002185- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2186 release without strong cryptography.
2187
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002188- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002189 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002190
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002191- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2192 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2193
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002194Mac
2195---
2196
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002197- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2198 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002199
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002200- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2201 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2202 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002203
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002204- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2205 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002206
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002207- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2208 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2209 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2210 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002211
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002212- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002213 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2214 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2215 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002216
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002217
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002218What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002219=================================
2220
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002221*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002222
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002223Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002224--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002225
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002226- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2227
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002228- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2229 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002230 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002231 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002232 a different meaning than before.
2233
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002234- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002235 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002236 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002237
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002238- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002239 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002240 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002241
2242- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2243 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2244 and deallocation.
2245
2246- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2247 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2248
2249- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2250 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2251 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2252 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2253 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2254
2255- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2256 now detected by the garbage collector.
2257
2258- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2259 [SF bug 519621]
2260
2261- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2262 identifier.
2263
2264- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2265 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2266 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2267 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2268 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2269 [SF bug 563060]
2270
2271- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2272 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2273 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2274 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2275 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2276
2277- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2278 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2279 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2280
2281- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2282
2283- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2284 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2285 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2286 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2287 state of the slots would be lost.)
2288
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002289Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002290-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002291
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002292- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002293 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2294 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2295 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2296 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002297 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2298 Jython 2.1.
2299
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002300- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002301 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002302 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2303 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2304 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2305 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2306 these, see PEP 302.
2307
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002308- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2309 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2310 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2311
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002312- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2313 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2314 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2315
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002316- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2317 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2318 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2319
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002320- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2321 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2322 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2323 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2324 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2325 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2326 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2327 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2328 releases or implementations.
2329
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002330- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002331 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2332 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002333
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002334- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2335 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2336
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002337- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2338 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2339 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2340
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002341- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2342 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2343
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002344- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2345 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002346 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2347 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002348
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002349- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2350 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2351 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2352 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2353 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2354
2355 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2356 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2357 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2358 pattern.
2359
2360 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2361 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2362 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2363 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2364
2365 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2366 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2367 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2368 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2369 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2370 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2371
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002372- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2373 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2374 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2375 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2376 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2377 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2378 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2379 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002380
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002381- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2382 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2383 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2384 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2385 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002386 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2387 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2388 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2389 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2390 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2391 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2392 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002393
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002394- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2395 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2396
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002397- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2398 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2399 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2400 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2401 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2402 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2403 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2404 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2405 to Zack Weinberg!
2406
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002407- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2408 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2409 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2410 type. This has been fixed now.
2411
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002412- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2413 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2414 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2415
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002416- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2417 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2418 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2419 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2420 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2421 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2422 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2423 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002424 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002425
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002426- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2427 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2428 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002429
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002430- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2431 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2432 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2433 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2434 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2435 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2436 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2437 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002438 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002439 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2440 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2441
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002442- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2443 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2444 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2445 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2446 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2447 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2448 this.)
2449
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002450- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2451 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002452 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002453 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002454 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2455 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002456 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2457 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002458
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002459- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2460 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2461 currently running.
2462
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002463- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2464 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2465 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2466 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2467
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002468- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2469 as directory names.
2470
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002471- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2472 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2473
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002474- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2475 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2476
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002477- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002478 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2479 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002480
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002481- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2482 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2483 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2484 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2485 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2486
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002487- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2488 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2489 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2490 removed.
2491
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002492- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2493 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2494 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2495
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002496- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2497 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2498 to __debug__.
2499
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002500- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2501 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2502 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2503
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002504- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2505 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2506 deprecated now.
2507
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002508- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2509 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2510 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002511
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002512- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2513 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2514 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2515 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2516 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002517
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002518- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2519 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2520
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002521- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2522 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2523 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002524 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002525 is backward compatible.
2526
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002527- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2528 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2529 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2530 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2531 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2532
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002533- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2534 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2535 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2536 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2537 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2538 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002539
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002540- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2541 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2542
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002543- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2544 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2545
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002546- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2547 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2548 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2549 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2550 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2551
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002552- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2553 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2554 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2555
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002556- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002557 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2558
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002559- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2560 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2561 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002562
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002563- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2564 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2565
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002566- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2567 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2568 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2569
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002570- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2571
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002572Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002573-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002574
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002575- Added three operators to the operator module:
2576 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2577 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2578 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2579
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002580- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2581
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002582- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2583 archives.
2584
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002585- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2586 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2587 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2588
2589 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2590
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002591- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2592 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2593 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002594 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002595
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002596- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2597 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2598 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2599 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002600 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2601 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2602 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2603 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002604
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002605- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2606 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002607
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002608- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2609
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002610- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2611 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2612
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002613- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2614 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2615 supported.
2616
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002617- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2618
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002619- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2620 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002621
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002622- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2623 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2624
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002625- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2626
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002627- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2628 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2629
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002630- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2631 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2632 functions but callable type objects.
2633
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002634- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002635 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002636 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002637
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002638- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2639 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002640
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002641- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2642 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002643
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002644- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2645 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2646 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2647 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2648
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002649- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2650 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002651
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002652- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2653 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2654 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2655 and __imul__.
2656
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002657- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002658 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2659 is called.
2660
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002661- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2662 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2663 interpreter was compiled.
2664
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002665- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2666 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2667 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002668 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002669 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2670 1, not 2.
2671
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002672- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2673 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2674 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2675 limit.
2676
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002677- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2678 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2679 bug #623464.
2680
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002681- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2682 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2683 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2684 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2685
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002686Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002687-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002688
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002689- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2690
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002691- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2692 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2693 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2694 with Python 2.3a2.
2695
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002696- os.path exposes getctime.
2697
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002698- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002699 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002700 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002701 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002702 unit tests of floating point results.
2703
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002704- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2705 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2706 has been increased.
2707
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002708- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2709 executed.
2710
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002711- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2712 postinstallation script.
2713
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002714- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2715 test the current module.
2716
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002717- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002718 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2719 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2720 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2721 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2722
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002723- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002724 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002725 Ward's Optik package.
2726
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002727- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2728 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2729 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2730 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2731
2732- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2733 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002734 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002735
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002736- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2737 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2738 shelf are binary pickles.
2739
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002740- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2741 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2742
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002743- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2744 modules are iterators now.
2745
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002746- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2747 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2748 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2749 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2750 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2751 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002752
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002753- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2754 with their entity value.
2755
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002756- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2757
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002758- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2759 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002760
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002761- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2762 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002763 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002764
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002765- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2766 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2767 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2768 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2769 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2770 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2771 main():
2772
2773 import locale
2774 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2775
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002776- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2777 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2778
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002779- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2780 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2781 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2782 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2783 to the new standard.
2784
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002785- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2786 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2787 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2788 an extension to the database.
2789
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002790- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2791 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2792 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2793 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002794 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002795
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002796- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002797 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002798
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002799- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2800 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2801 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2802 bounded integers.
2803
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002804- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2805 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2806 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2807 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2808 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2809 in existence.
2810
2811 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2812 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2813 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2814 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2815 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2816 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2817
2818 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2819 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2820 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2821 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2822
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002823- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2824 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2825 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2826
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002827- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2828
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002829- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2830 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2831 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2832 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2833
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002834- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2835 argument.
2836
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002837- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2838 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2839 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2840 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2841 [SF patch 560794].
2842
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002843- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2844 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2845 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002846 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2847 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2848 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002849
2850- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2851 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002852
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002853- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2854 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2855 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2856 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002857
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002858- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2859 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2860 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2861 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2862 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2863
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002864- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002865
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002866- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2867
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002868- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2869 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2870 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2871 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2872 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2873 identical to None.
2874
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002875- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2876 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2877 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2878 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2879 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2880 results now.
2881
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002882- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2883 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2884
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002885- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2886 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2887 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2888 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2889 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2890 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2891 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2892 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2893
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002894- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2895
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002896- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2897 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2898
2899- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2900 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2901 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2902 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2903 and other systems.
2904
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002905- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2906 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2907 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2908 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 +00002909 work well with these.
2910
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002911- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2912
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002913- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002914 connections.
2915
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002916- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2917 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2918 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2919
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002920- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2921 sets
2922
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002923- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2924 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2925 name.
2926
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002927- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2928 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2929 passed in.
2930
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002931- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002932 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002933 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2934 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002935
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002936- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2937
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002938- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2939
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002940- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2941 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2942 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2943
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002944- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2945 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2946 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2947 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002948 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002949
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002950- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002951 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002952 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002953
2954- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2955 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2956 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2957
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002958- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002959 the value of its expression argument.
2960
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002961- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2962 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2963 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2964
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002965- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2966 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2967 skipstone browser was included.
2968
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002969- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2970 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2971
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002972Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002974
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002975- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2976 names in addition to accepting file names.
2977
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002978- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2979 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2980 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2981 still used and useful.)
2982
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002983- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2984 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2985 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2986 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002987
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002988- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2989 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2990 the generated binary.
2991
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002992Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002993-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002994
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002995- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2996
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002997- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2998 except in the hands of experts.
2999
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003000- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003001 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3002 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3003 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003004
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003005- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3006 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3007 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3008 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3009 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3010 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3011 builds.
3012
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003013- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3014 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3015 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3016 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3017 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3018 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3019 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3020 new type.
3021
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003022- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003023
3024 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3025 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3026 positive infinities.
3027
3028 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3029 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3030 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3031 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3032 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3033 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3034 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3035
3036 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3037
3038 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3039
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003040- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3041 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3042 size of the executable.
3043
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003044- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3045 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3046 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3047 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003048
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003049- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3050
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003051- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3052 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3053 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003054
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003055- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3056 well as Unix.
3057
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003058- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3059 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3060 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3061 modules in the README file for details.
3062
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003063C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003064-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003065
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003066- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3067 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003068 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003069 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003070 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003071
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003072- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3073 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3074 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3075 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3076 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3077 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003078 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003079 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3080 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3081 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3082 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3083 aligned.)
3084
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003085- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3086 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3087 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3088
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003089- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3090 level.
3091
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003092- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3093 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3094 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3095 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3096 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3097
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003098- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3099 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3100 code.
3101
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003102- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3103 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3104 adjusting for negative indices.
3105
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003106- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3107 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3108 object.
3109
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003110- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3111 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3112 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3113
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003114- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3115 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003116
3117- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3118
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003119- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3120 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3121 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3122 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3123
3124- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3125
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003126- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003127
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003128- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003129 without going through the buffer API.
3130
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003132
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003133- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3134 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3135 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3136 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3137
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003138- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3139 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3140
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003141- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003142 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3143
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003144New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003145-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003146
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003147- OpenVMS is now supported.
3148
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003149- AtheOS is now supported.
3150
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003151- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3152
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003153- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3154
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003155Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003156-----
3157
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003158- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3159 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3160 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003161
3162Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003163-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003164
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003165- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3166 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3167 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3168 bugs.
3169 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003170 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003171 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3172 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003173 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003174
3175- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003176 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003177
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003178- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3179 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3180
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003181- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3182 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003183 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003184 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3185
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003186- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3187 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3188 use files" uninstall option).
3189
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003190- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3191
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003192- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3193 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3194
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003195- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3196 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3197 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3198
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003199- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3200 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3201 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3202 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3203 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003204 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3205 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3206 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003207
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003208- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003209 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003210 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3211 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3212 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3213 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3214 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3215 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3216 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3217 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3218 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3219 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3220 work around.
3221
3222- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3223 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3224 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3225 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3226 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3227 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3228 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3229 specified with O_CREAT too).
3230
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003231Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003232----
3233
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003234- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003235
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003236- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3237 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3238 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3239
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003240- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3241 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3242 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3243
3244- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3245 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3246 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3247 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3248 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3249 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3250 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3251 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003252
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003253- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3254 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3255 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003256
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003257- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3258 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3259 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3260 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3261 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003262
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003263- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3264 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3265 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003266
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003267- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3268 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003269
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003270- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3271 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3272 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3273 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3274 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003275
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003276- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3277 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3278 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3279
3280- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3281 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3282 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003283
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003284- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3285 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3286 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3287 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003288 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003289
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003290- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3291 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003292
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003293- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3294 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003295
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003296- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003297 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003298 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3299 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003300
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003301
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003302What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003303===============================
3304
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003305*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3306
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003307Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003308--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003309
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003310- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3311 with a custom metaclass.
3312
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003313Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003315
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003316- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3317 are proxies.
3318
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003319Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003320-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003321
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003322- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3323 very short strings.
3324
3325- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3326 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3327 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3328 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3329 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3330
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003331Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003332-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003333
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003334- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3335 close or delete time).
3336
3337- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3338 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3339
3340- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3341
3342- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003343 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003344
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003345Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003347
3348Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003349-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003350
3351C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003352-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003353
3354New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003355-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003356
3357Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003358-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003359
3360Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003362
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003363- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3364
3365- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3366 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3367
3368- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3369 deleted at process exit time.
3370
3371- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3372 in backslash.
3373
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003374Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003375----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003376
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003377- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3378 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3379 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3380
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003381
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003382What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003383===========================
3384
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003385*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3386
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003387Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003388--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003389
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003390- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3391 been extensively updated. See
3392
3393 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3394
3395 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3396
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003397- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3398 deleted!
3399
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003400- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3401 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3402 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3403 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3404 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3405
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003406- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3407
3408 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3409 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3410
3411 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3412 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3413 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3414 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3415 supported anyway.
3416
3417 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3418 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3419
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003420- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3421 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3422 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3423 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3424 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003425
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003426- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3427 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3428 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3429
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003430Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003431-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003432
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003433- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3434 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3435 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3436 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3437 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3438 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003439 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3440 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3441 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3442 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003443
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003444- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3445 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3446 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3447
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003448Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003450
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003451- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3452
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003453Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003454-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003455
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003456- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3457 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3458 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3459 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3460 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3461 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3462
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003463- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3464
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003465- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3466
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003467- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3468
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003469- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3470 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3471 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3472
3473- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3474
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003475Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003476-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003477
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003478- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3479 off a search on Google.
3480
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003481Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003483
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003484- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3485 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3486 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3487 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3488 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3489 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3490 other platforms should do likewise.
3491
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003492- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3493 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3494 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3495
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003496C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003497-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003498
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003499- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3500 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3501 producing key-value pairs.
3502
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003503- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003504 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003505 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3506 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3507 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3508 previously went unchallenged.
3509
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003510New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003511-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003512
3513Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003515
3516Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003518
3519Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003521
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003522- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3523 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003524
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003525- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3526 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3527 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3528 home.
3529
3530
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003531What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003532===========================
3533
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003534*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3535
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003536Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003538
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003539- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3540 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003541
3542 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003543 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003544
3545 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3546 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003547 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003548 This needs to be documented.
3549
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003550- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3551 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3552
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003553- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3554 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3555 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3556
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003557- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3558 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3559
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003560- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3561 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3562 class forbids it).
3563
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003564- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3565 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3566 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3567
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003568- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3569
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003570Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003572
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003573- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3574 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003575 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003576
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003577- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3578 (like 1 + '').
3579
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003580Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003582
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003583- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3584 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3585 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3586 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003587 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003588 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3589
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003590- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3591 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3592 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3593 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3594
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003595- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3596 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003597 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3598 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3599 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003600
3601- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3602 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003603
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003604- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3605 bytes on its input.
3606
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003607Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003609
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003610- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003611 convenience function.
3612
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003613- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3614 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3615 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003616 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3617 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3618 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3619 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3620 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3621 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003622
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003623- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3624 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3625 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3626 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3627
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003628- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3629 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3630 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3631
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003632- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3633 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3634 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3635 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3636
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003637- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3638 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003639 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003640 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3641 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3642 new -l and -e options.
3643
3644- statcache is now deprecated.
3645
3646- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3647 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003648 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003649 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3650 time properly taken into account.
3651
3652- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3653 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3654 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3655 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3656
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003657Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003658-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003659
3660Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003661-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003662
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003663- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3664 is built with libdb3 if available.
3665
3666- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3667
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003668C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003669-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003670
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003671- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3672 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3673 PySequence_Size().
3674
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003675- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3676
3677- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3678 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3679 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3680
3681- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3682 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3683
3684- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3685 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3686
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003687New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003689
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003690- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3691 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3692
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003693- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3694 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3695
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003696- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3697
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003698Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003700
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003701- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3702 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3703
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003704Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003706
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003707Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003708----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003709
3710- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3711 removed completely in the next release.
3712
3713- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3714 OSX.
3715
3716- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3717 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3718
3719- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3720
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003721
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003722What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003723===========================
3724
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003725*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3726
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003727Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003728--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003729
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003730- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003731 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003732 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003733 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3734 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003735 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3736 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003737 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3738 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003739
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003740- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3741 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3742
3743- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3744 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3745
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003746Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003748
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003749- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3750 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3751 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3752 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3753 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3754 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3755 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3756 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3757
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003758- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3759 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3760 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3761 example).
3762
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003763- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003764 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003765 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003766 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003767
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003768- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3769 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3770 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003771 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003772
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003773- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3774 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3775 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3776 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3777 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3778 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3779
3780 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3781
3782 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3783
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003784Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003786
3787- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3788
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003789- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3790
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003791- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3792 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003793
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003794- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3795 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3796 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3797 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3798 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3799 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003800 attributes.
3801
3802- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3803 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3804 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003805
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003806- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3807 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3808 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003809
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003810- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3811 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3812 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003813 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3814 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3815
3816- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3817 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003818
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003819Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003820-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003821
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003822- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3823 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3824
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003825- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3826 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3827 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3828 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3829
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003830- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3831 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3832 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3833 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3834
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003835 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3836 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3837 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3838 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3839 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3840 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3841 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3842 without losing information).
3843
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003844- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003845 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3846 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3847 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3848 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3849 module).
3850
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003851 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003852 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3853 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3854 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3855 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003856
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003857- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003858 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3859 encoding.
3860
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003861- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3862 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3863
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003865 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3866
3867- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3868 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3869 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3870 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3871
3872- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3873
3874- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3875 ON, and OFF.
3876
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003877- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3878 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3879
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003880Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003881-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003882
3883- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3884 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3885 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003886
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003887- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3888 been added: -X and -E.
3889
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003890Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003891-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003892
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003893- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3894 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3895
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003896C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003897-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003898
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003899- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3900 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3901 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3902 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3903 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3904
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003905- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3906 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3907 as long) arguments.
3908
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003909- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3910 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3911 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3912 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3913 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3914 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3915
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003916- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3917 input.
3918
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003919New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003921
3922Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003923-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003924
3925Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003927
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003928- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3929 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3930 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3931
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003932- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3933 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3934 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003935 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003936
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3938 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3939 import signal
3940 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003941
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003942 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003943 while 1:
3944 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003945 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003946 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3947 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3948 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3949 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003950
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003951
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003952What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3953===========================
3954
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3956
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003957Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003959
3960- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3961 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3962 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3963
3964- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3965 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3966 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3967 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3968 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3969 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3970 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003971
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003972- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003973 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003974 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3975 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3976 associate a docstring with a property.
3977
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003978- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3979 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3980 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3981 other built-in object types.
3982
3983- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3984 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3985 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3986 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3987 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3988
3989- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3990 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3991
3992- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3993 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003994 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003995 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3996 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3997 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3998 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3999 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4000
4001- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4002 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4003 class.
4004
4005- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4006 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4007 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4008 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4009
4010- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4011 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4012 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4013 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4014
4015- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4016 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4017
4018- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4019 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4020 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4021 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4022 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004023 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004024 with the same value as s.
4025
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004026- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4027
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004028Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004029----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004030
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004031- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4032
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004033- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4034 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4035 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4036 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4037 objects.
4038
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004039- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4040 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004041 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4042 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4043
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004044- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4045 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4046 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4047
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004048Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004050
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004051- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4052 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4053 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4054 by the instances.
4055
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004056- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4057 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4058 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4059
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004060- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4061 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4062 before the entire comparison is complete.
4063
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004064- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4065 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4066 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4067
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004068- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4069 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4070 getwriter().
4071
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004072- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4073 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4074
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004075- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004076 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4077 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4078
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004079- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4080 iterable object.
4081
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004082- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4083 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004084
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004085- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4086 authentication.
4087
4088- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4089 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004090
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004091- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004092 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4093 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4094 a sample driver.)
4095
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004096Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004098
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004099- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4100 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4101 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4102 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4103 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4104 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4105 kernel has large file support.
4106
4107- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4108 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4109 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4110 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4111 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4112
4113- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4114 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4115 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4116
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004117C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004119
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004120- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4121 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4122
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004123New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004124-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004125
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004126- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4127 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4128
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004129Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004131
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004132- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4133 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4134 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4135 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4136 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4137
4138- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4139 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4140 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4141 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4142
4143- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4144 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4145
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004146Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004148
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004149- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004150 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4151 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004152
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004153
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004154What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4155===========================
4156
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4158
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004159Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004160----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004161
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004162- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4163 big to represent as a C double.
4164
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004165- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4166 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4167 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4168 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4169 restriction).
4170
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004171- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4172 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4173 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4174 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4175 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4176
4177 >>> dir([])
4178 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4179 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4180 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4181 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4182 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4183 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4184 'reverse', 'sort']
4185
4186 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4187
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004188- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004189 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4190 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4191 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4192 OverflowError exception.
4193
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004194- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004195 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004196 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4197 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4198 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4199 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4200 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004201 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4203 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4204
4205 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4206 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4207 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4208 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004209
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004210- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004211 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4212 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4213 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4214 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4215 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4216 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4217 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4218 once it is created.
4219
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004220- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4221 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4222 (key, value) pairs.
4223
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004224- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004225 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4226 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4227
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004228- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4229 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4230 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4231 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4232 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004233
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004234- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004235 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4236 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4237
4238 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4239
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004240- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004241 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4242
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004243Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004245
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004246- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004247 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4248 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004249
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004250- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4251 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4252 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4253 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4254 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4255 in this area anymore).
4256
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004257- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4258 threading.Timer.
4259
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004260- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4261 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4262
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004263- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004264 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4265
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004266- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004267 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4268 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4269 converted to Python longs.
4270
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004271- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004272 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4273
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004274- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4275 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4276 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4277
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004278Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004280
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004281- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4282 division operators as per PEP 238.
4283
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004284Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004285-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004286
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004287- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4288 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4289 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4290 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4291
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004292C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004293-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004294
4295- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004296
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004297- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4298 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004299 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004300
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4302 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004303 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004305
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004306- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004307 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4308 module:
4309
4310 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004311
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004312 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4313 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004314
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004315 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4316 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004317
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004318 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4319
4320 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4321
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004322- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004323 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4324 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4325 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004326
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004327New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004329
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004330- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4331 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4332 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4333 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4334 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004335
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004336Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004338
4339Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004341
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004342- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4343 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4344 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4345 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004346 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4347 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4348 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4349 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4350 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004351
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004352- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004353 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4354
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004355
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004356What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4357===========================
4358
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4360
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004361Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004363
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004364- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4365 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4366
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004367- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4368 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4369 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004370
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004371- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4372 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4373 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4374 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004375
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004376- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4377
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004379
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004380Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004382
4383- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004384 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004385 the module docstring for details.
4386
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004387Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004389
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004390- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004391 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4392 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4393 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004394
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004395- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4396 Nick Mathewson.
4397
4398Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004399----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004400
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004401- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4402 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4403 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4404 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4405 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4406 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4407 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4408 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4409
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004410- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4411 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4412 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4413 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4414
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004415- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4416 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4417 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4418 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4419 come a long way).
4420
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004421- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4422 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4423 write filters for these warnings).
4424
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004425- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4426 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4427 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4428 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4429 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4430
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004431- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4432 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4433 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4434 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4435 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4436 older distribution.
4437
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004438Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004440
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004441- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4442 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004443 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004444
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004445- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4446 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4447 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4448
4449- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4450
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004451- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4452
4453- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4454
4455- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4456
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004458
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004459- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4460
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004461New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004462-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004463
4464C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004465-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004466
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004467- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4468 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4469 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4470 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4471 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4472 against buffer overruns.
4473
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004474- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004475 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4476 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004477 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4478 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4479 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4480
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004481- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4482 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4483 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4484 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4485 deprecated.
4486
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004487Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004489
4490- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4491 relevant is found.
4492
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004493
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004494What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004495===========================
4496
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004497*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4498
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004499Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004501
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004502- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4503 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4504 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4505 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4506 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4507 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4508 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4509 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004510 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004511 repaired.
4512
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004513- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004514 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004515 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4516 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4517 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4518 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4519 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4520 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4521 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4522 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4523
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004524- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4525 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4526 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4527 leading BMO character).
4528
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004529- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4530 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4531 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4532
4533 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4534 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4535 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004536
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004537 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4538 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4539 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4540 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4541 for various simple to use conversions.
4542
4543 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4544 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4545
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4547 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4548 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4549 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4550 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4551 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4552 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4553 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4554 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4555 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4556 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4557 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4558 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4559 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4560 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004561
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004562- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4563 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4564 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004565 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004566 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004567
4568 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004569 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4570 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4571 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4572 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4573 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004574 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4575 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004576
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004577 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4578 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4579 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004580 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004581
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004582- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4583 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4584 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4585 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4586 floating arithmetic,
4587
4588 x = 9007199254740992.0
4589 print long(x)
4590
4591 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4592 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4593 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4594 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4595 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4596 functions are of good quality).
4597
4598 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4599 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4600 algorithms to break.
4601
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004602- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4603 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4604 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4605 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4606 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4607 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4608 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4609 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4610 order.
4611
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004612- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4613 operation along the most common code paths.
4614
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004615- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4616 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4617
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004618- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4619 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4620 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4621 {}.update(UserDict())
4622
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004623- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4624 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4625 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4626 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4627 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4628 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4629 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4630 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4631
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004632- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004633 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004635 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004636 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4637 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004638 join() method of strings
4639 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004640 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4641 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004642 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004643 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004644
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004645- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4646 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4647
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004648- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4649 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4650
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004651- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4652 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4653 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4654 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4655
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004656- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4657 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004658 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004659 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4660 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004661
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004662- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4663
4664
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004665Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004667
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004668- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004669 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004670 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4671 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4672
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004673- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4674 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4675
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004676- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4677 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4678 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4679 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4680
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004681- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4682 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4683 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4684
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004685- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4686
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004687- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4688
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004689- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4690 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4691 that are still imported into string.py).
4692
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004693- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4694
4695- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4696 Now it does.
4697
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004698- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4699
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004700- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4701 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4702 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4703 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4704 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004705 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4706 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004707
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004708- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4709 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4710 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4711 'help(object)'.
4712
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004713Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004714-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004715
4716- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004717 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004718 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4719 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4720
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004721- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004722 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4723 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004724
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004725C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004727
4728- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4729 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004730
4731----
4732
4733**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**