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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
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
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):
19 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect this XXX before 2.4a2)
20
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
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +000086- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
87
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +000088- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
89 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
90 same as when the argument is omitted).
91 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
92
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +000093- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
94
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +000095- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
96 schemes are offered.
97
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +000098- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
99
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000100- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
101 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
102 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
103
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000104- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
105
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000106- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
107 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
108
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000109- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
110 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
111 when dummy_threading is being used.
112
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000113- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
114 from a tarfile.
115
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000116- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000117 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000118
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000119- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
120 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
121 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
122 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
123
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000124- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
125 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
126
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000127- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
128 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
129 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
130 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
131 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
132 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
133 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
134 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
135 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
136 by some other method in progress).
137
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000138- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
139 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
140 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000141
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000142- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
143
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000144- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
145 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
146 AM Kuchling.
147
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000148- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
149 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
150 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
151
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000152- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
153 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
154 instead of unsigned.
155
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000156- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000157 no longer part of the public API.
158
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000159- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
160 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
161 string methods of the same name).
162
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000163- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
164 SF patch 982681.
165
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000166- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000167 SF patch 945642.
168
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000169- doctest unittest integration improvements:
170
171 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
172
173 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
174 DocTestSuites.
175
176- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
177 that provide thread-local data.
178
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000179- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
180 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
181
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000182- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
183
184- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
185 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
186 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
187
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000188- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
189
190 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
191 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
192 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000193
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000194 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
195 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
196 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
197 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
198
199 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
200 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
201
202 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
203 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
204 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
205 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
206
207 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
208 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
209 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
210 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
211 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
212
213 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
214 wrapping help output.
215
216 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
217 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
218 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000219
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000220Tools/Demos
221-----------
222
223Build
224-----
225
226C API
227-----
228
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000229- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
230 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
231 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
232 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
233 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
234 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
235 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
236 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
237 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
238 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
239 its visible semantics have not changed.
240
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000241- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
242 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
243
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000244Documentation
245-------------
246
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000247- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000248
249 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
250 assigning thier values
251
252 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
253
254 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
255
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000256- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000257
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000258New platforms
259-------------
260
261Tests
262-----
263
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000264- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000265 platforms that use the Makefile.
266
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000267- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
268 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
269 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
270
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000271Windows
272-------
273
274Mac
275---
276
277
278
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000279What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
280=================================
281
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000282*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000283
284Core and builtins
285-----------------
286
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000287- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
288 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
289 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
290 objects now (one object instead of three).
291
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000292- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
293 Windows DLLs.
294
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000295- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
296 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000297
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000298- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
299 a new .pyc magic.
300
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000301- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
302 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
303 be there.
304
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000305- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
306 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
307 the LC_NUMERIC category.
308
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000309- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
310 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
311 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
312
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000313- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
314
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000315- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
316 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
317 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000318
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000319- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
320 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
321
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000322- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
323
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000324- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000325 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000326
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000327- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
328
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000329- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
330
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000331- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
332 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
333
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000334- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
335 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
336 Fixes bug #858016 .
337
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000338- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
339 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
340 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
341
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000342- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
343 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
344 improves their performance (about 35%).
345
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000346- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
347 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
348 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
349
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000350- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
351 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
352 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
353 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
354
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000355- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
356 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
357 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
358 length is not known).
359
360- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
361 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000362 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
363 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000364 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
365
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000366- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
367 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
368
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000369- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
370 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
371 keyword arguments.
372
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000373- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
374 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
375 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
376
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000377- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
378 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
379 cases.
380
381- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
382 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
383 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
384 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
385 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
386 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
387 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
388 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
389 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
390 a release build.
391
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000392- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
393 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
394
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000395- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000396 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000397
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000398- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
399 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
400 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
401 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
402 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
403 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
404 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
405 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
406 destroyed.
407
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000408- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
409 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
410 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
411 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
412 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
413 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
414 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
415 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
416
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000417- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
418 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
419 character other than a space.
420
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000421- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
422 by the function object or by the method object, the function
423 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
424 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
425 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
426 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
427 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
428 attributes with the same name.
429
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000430- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
431 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
432 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
433 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
434 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
435 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
436 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
437 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
438 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
439 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
440 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
441 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
442 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
443 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000444
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000445- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
446 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
447 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
448 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
449 This has been repaired.
450
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000451- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
452
453- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
454
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000455- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
456 over a sequence.
457
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000458- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000459 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000460
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000461- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
462
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000463- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
464 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
465 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
466 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
467 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
468 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
469 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
470 records with equal keys is unchanged).
471
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000472- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
473 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
474 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
475
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000476- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
477 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
478 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
479 freelist.
480
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000481- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
482 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
483
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000484- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
485 number.
486
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000487- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
488 a TypeError exception.
489
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000490- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
491 820195.
492
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000493- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
494 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
495 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
496
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000497- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000498 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
499 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000500
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000501- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
502 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
503 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
504
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000505- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
506 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000507 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000508
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000509- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000510 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
511 the first call.
512
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000513
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000514Extension modules
515-----------------
516
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000517- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
518 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
519
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000520- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
521 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
522 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
523 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
524 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
525 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
526 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000527
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000528- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
529
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000530- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
531
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000532- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
533 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
534
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000535- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
536 fewer false positives.
537
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000538- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
539 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
540
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000541- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000542 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
543
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000544- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000545 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000546 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
547 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
548 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000549
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000550- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
551 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
552 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
553 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
554
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000555- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
556 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
557 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
558 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
559 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
560 #897625.
561
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000562- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
563 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
564
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000565- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
566 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
567 and pops on either side of the deque.
568
569- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
570 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
571
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000572- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
573 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
574 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
575 other functions that expect a function argument.
576
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000577- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
578
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000579- os.getsid was added.
580
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000581- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
582 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
583 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
584
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000585- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
586
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000587- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
588
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000589- readline.clear_history was added.
590
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000591- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
592
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000593- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
594
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000595- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
596
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000597- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
598
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000599- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
600
601- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
602
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000603- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
604
605- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
606
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000607- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
608 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
609 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
610
611- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
612 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
613 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
614 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
615 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
616 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
617 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
618
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000619- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
620 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
621 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
622 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000623
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000624- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000625 iterators from a single iterable.
626
627- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
628 of raising a TypeError exception.
629
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000630- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
631 as parameter.
632
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000633Library
634-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000635
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000636- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
637 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
638 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000639
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000640- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
641 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
642 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000643
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000644- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000645
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000646- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
647 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000648
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000649- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
650 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
651
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000652- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
653
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000654- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000655 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000656
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000657- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
658 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
659
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000660- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
661
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000662- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
663 on cygwin and mingw32.
664
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000665- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
666
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000667- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
668 module.
669
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000670- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
671 installation scheme for all platforms.
672
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000673- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000674 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000675
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000676- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
677 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
678 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
679
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000680- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
681 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
682 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
683
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000684- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
685
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000686- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
687
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000688- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
689 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
690
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000691- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
692 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
693 type pattern with the same value exists.
694
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000695- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
696 when run from the command prompt).
697
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000698- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
699 not taken into consideration when caching value.
700
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000701- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
702 default sort).
703
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000704- Added global runctx function to profile module
705
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000706- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
707
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000708- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
709
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000710- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
711
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000712- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000713 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
714 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
715 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
716 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
717 accordingly.
718
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000719- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
720 decoding standards.
721
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000722- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
723 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
724 called for all requests.
725
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000726- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
727 they are passed to the compiler.
728
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000729- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
730 indent, width and depth.
731
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000732- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
733 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
734
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000735- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
736 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
737
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000738- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
739
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000740- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
741
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000742- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
743
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000744- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
745 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
746
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000747- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000748 for better performance.
749
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000750- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000751
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000752- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
753 a string).
754
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000755- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
756
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000757- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
758
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000759- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
760
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000761- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
762
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000763- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
764 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
765 list of fieldnames.
766
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000767- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
768 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
769
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000770- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
771
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000772- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
773 empty lists.
774
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000775- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
776 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
777 and shelves.
778
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000779- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
780 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
781
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000782- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000783 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
784 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000785
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000786- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
787 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000788 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000789
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000790- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000791 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
792 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
793
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000794- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
795 and removed in Py2.4.
796
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000797- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
798
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000799- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
800
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000801Tools/Demos
802-----------
803
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000804- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
805 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
806
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000807- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
808
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000809- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
810 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
811 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
812 destination in situations where both files are given.
813
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000814- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
815 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
816 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
817 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
818
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000819- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
820
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000821- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
822 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
823 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
824 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
825 now.
826
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000827- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
828 in effect
829
830- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
831 C-c C-h
832
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000833- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
834 -d option was given.
835
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000836Build
837-----
838
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000839- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
840 build under OS X.
841
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000842- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
843 --enable-profiling.
844
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000845- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
846 is configured --with-tsc.
847
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000848- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
849 on AMD64.
850
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000851- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
852 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
853
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000854- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
855 removed.
856
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000857- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
858 supported (see PEP 11).
859
860- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
861
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000862- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
863
864- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
865 (see PEP 11).
866
867- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
868 sizeof(char) must be 1.
869
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000870C API
871-----
872
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000873- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
874 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
875 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
876
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000877- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
878 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
879 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
880 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
881
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000882- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
883 generator objects.
884
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000885- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
886 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000887 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
888 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000889
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000890- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
891 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
892
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000893- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
894 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
895 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
896 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
897 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
898
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000899- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
900 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
901 about 10% faster.
902
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000903- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
904 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
905
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000906- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
907 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
908 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
909 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
910
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000911Windows
912-------
913
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000914- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
915 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
916 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
917 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
918
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000919- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
920 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
921 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
922
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000923
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000924What's New in Python 2.3 final?
925===============================
926
927*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
928
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000929IDLE
930----
931
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000932- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
933 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
934 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
935 context-menu actions.
936
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000937- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
938 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
939 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
940 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
941 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
942 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
943 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
944 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
945 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
946
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000947
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000948What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
949=============================================
950
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000951*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000952
953Core and builtins
954-----------------
955
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000956- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000957 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000958 comment at the end are still unsupported.
959
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000960Extension modules
961-----------------
962
963- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
964 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
965 than once. This has been fixed.
966
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000967- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
968 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
969 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
970 call.
971
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000972- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
973
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000974Library
975-------
976
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000977- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
978 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
979
980- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
981 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
982 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
983 restored.
984
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000985IDLE
986----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000987
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000988- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000989
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000990Build
991-----
992
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000993- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
994 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
995
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000996C API
997-----
998
999Windows
1000-------
1001
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001002- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1003 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1004
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001005- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1006
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001007Mac
1008---
1009
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001010- Various fixes to pimp.
1011
1012- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1013
1014- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1015 more problems than it solves.
1016
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001017
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001018What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1019=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001020
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001021*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1022
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001023Core and builtins
1024-----------------
1025
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001026- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1027 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1028
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001029- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1030 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001031 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001032
1033- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1034 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1035 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001036 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001037
1038- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1039 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001040
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001041- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1042 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1043 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1044
1045- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001046 770247.
1047
1048- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001049
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001050Extension modules
1051-----------------
1052
1053- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1054 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1055
1056- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1057
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001058- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1059
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001060- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1061 contained within the _strptime module.
1062
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001063- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1064 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1065
1066- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001067 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1068
1069- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1070 the find_class attribute, if present.
1071
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001072- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001073
1074 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1075 (SF bug 763298).
1076
1077 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001078 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1079 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1080 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001081
1082 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1083
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001084Library
1085-------
1086
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001087- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1088
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001089- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1090 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1091 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1092 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1093 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1094 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1095 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1096 or Tester().
1097
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001098- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1099 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1100 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1101 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1102 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1103 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1104 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1105 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1106 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001107
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001108 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001109
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001110- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1111 weren't before was an oversight.
1112
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001113- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1114 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1115
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001116- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1117 when there are no lines.
1118
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001119- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1120 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1121
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001122- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1123 to child processes.
1124
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001125- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1126
1127- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1128
1129- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1130 xmlrpclib.
1131
1132- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1133 responses.
1134
1135- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1136 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1137
1138- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1139 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1140 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1141
1142- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1143 used as patterns.
1144
1145- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1146 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1147 than Tk 8.3.
1148
1149- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1150
1151- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001152
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001153Tools/Demos
1154-----------
1155
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001156- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1157
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001158- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1159
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001160- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001161
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001162Build
1163-----
1164
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001165- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1166
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001167- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1168
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001169- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1170 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001171
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001172- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1173 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1174 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001175
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001176C API
1177-----
1178
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001179- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1180 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1181
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001182Windows
1183-------
1184
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001185- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1186 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1187 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1188 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1189 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1190 Python exception ::
1191
1192 thread.error: can't start new thread
1193
1194 is raised now.
1195
1196- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1197 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1198 instead of from DLL teardown.
1199
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001200Mac
1201---
1202
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001203- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001204 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001205 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1206 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1207 the executable in the bundle.
1208
1209- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001210
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001211- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1212
1213- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1214 on Panther.
1215
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001216What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1217================================
1218
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001219*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001220
1221Core and builtins
1222-----------------
1223
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001224- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1225 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1226 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1227 with the -i option.
1228
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001229- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1230 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1231
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001232- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1233 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1234
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001235- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1236 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1237 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1238 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1239 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1240 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1241 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1242 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1243 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1244 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1245 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1246 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1247 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001248
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001249- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1250 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1251 embedded in a lambda expression.
1252
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001253- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1254 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1255 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1256 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1257 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1258
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001259- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1260 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1261 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1262
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001263- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1264 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1265
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001266- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1267 It's writable again.
1268
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001269- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1270 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1271 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001272 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001273
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001274- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1275 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1276 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1277
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001278Extension modules
1279-----------------
1280
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001281- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1282 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1283
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001284- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1285 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1286 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1287 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1288
1289- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1290 collection.
1291
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001292- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1293 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1294 unique within a single program run.
1295
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001296- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1297 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1298
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001299- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1300 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1301
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001302- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1303 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001304
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001305- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1306
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001307- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1308 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1309
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001310- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1311 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1312 for many BSD-derived systems.
1313
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001314
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001315Library
1316-------
1317
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001318- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1319 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1320 primary ones:
1321
1322 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1323 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1324 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1325
1326 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1327 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1328 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1329 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1330 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1331 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1332
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001333- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1334 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1335 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1336 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1337 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1338 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1339 argument.
1340
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001341- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1342 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1343 in the archive.
1344
1345- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1346 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1347
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001348- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1349 569574).
1350
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001351- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1352 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1353 no more.
1354
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001355- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1356 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1357 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1358 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1359 code coverage.
1360
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001361- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1362 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1363 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001364 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1365 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001366
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001367- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1368 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1369 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001370 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001371
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001372- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1373
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001374- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1375 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1376 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1377 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1378
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001379- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1380 handling.
1381
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001382- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1383 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1384
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001385- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1386 in socket.py.
1387
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001388- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1389
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001390- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1391 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1392 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1393 opener with proxy support.
1394
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001395- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1396
1397- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1398
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001399Tools/Demos
1400-----------
1401
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001402- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1403
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001404- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1405
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001406- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1407 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001408
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001409- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1410 files.
1411
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001412Build
1413-----
1414
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001415- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001416 different root directory.
1417
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001418C API
1419-----
1420
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001421- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1422 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1423 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1424 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1425 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1426 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1427 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1428 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1429 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1430 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1431
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001432- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1433 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1434 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1435 from Python.
1436
1437
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001438New platforms
1439-------------
1440
1441None this time.
1442
1443Tests
1444-----
1445
1446- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1447 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1448
1449Windows
1450-------
1451
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001452- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1453
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001454- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1455 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1456 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1457 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1458 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1459 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1460 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1461 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1462 that's what it's for.
1463
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001464Mac
1465---
1466
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001467- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1468 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1469 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1470 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001471- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1472 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1473- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001474
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001475SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1476------------------------------------
1477
1478430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1479598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1480622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1481661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1482683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1483697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1484713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1485724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1486727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1487729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1488730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1489731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1490732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1491733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1492735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1493740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1494744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1495745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1496747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1497749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1498751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1499753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1500755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1501757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1502760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1503
1504
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001505What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1506================================
1507
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001508*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001509
1510Core and builtins
1511-----------------
1512
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001513- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1514 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1515
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001516- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1517 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1518 and cannot be strings).
1519
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001520- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1521 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1522 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1523 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1524
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001525- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1526 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1527 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1528 Python itself.
1529
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001530- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1531 the referenced object, if it has one.
1532
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001533- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1534 the thread started at
1535 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1536
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001537- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1538 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1539 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1540 placed on a list index.
1541
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001542- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1543 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1544 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1545 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1546
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001547- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1548 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1549 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1550 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1551 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1552 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1553 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1554
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001555- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1556 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1557 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1558 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1559 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1560
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001561- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1562 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001563
1564- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1565 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1566 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1567 #693195.)
1568
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001569- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1570 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001571
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001572- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001573 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001574 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1575 interpreter executions, would fail.
1576
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001577- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001578 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001579 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001580
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001581Extension modules
1582-----------------
1583
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001584- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1585 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1586 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1587 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1588
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001589- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1590 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1591
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001592- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1593 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1594 and Greg Chapman.)
1595
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001596- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1597 recursively.
1598
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001599- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001600 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1601 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1602 leaks.
1603
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001604- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1605
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001606- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1607 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1608 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1609 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1610 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1611 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1612 #705836.
1613
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001614- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001615 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1616
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001617- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1618 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1619 See SF bug #692416.
1620
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001621- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1622 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1623
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001624- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1625 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1626 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001627
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001628- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001629 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1630 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1631
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001632- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1633 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1634 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1635 timeouts to work properly.
1636
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001637Library
1638-------
1639
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001640- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1641 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1642 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1643 future release.
1644
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001645- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1646 for querying platform dependent features.
1647
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001648- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001649
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001650- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1651 pickle protocol versions.
1652
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001653- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1654 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1655 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1656
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001657- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1658
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001659- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1660 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1661 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1662 modules.
1663
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001664- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1665 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1666 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1667
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001668- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1669 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1670
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001671- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1672 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1673 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1674
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001675- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001676 MS Office extensions.
1677
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001678- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1679 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1680
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001681- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1682 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1683
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001684- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1685 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1686 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1687 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1688 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1689 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1690
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001691- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1692 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1693 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001694
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001695- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1696 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1697 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1698
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001699- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1700
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001701- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1702 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1703 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1704
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001705Tools/Demos
1706-----------
1707
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001708- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1709 See the module docstring for details.
1710
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001711Build
1712-----
1713
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001714- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1715 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001716
1717C API
1718-----
1719
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001720- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1721
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001722- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1723 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1724 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1725
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001726- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1727 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001728
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001729 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1730 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1731 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001732
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001733- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001734 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1735
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001736- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1737 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1738 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001739
1740New platforms
1741-------------
1742
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001743None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001744
1745Tests
1746-----
1747
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001748- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1749 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001750
1751Windows
1752-------
1753
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001754- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1755 function.
1756
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001757- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1758 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001759
1760Mac
1761---
1762
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001763- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1764 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001765
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001766- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1767 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001768
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001769- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1770 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1771 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001772
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001773- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001774 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1775 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001776
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001777- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1778 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001779
1780
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001781What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1782=================================
1783
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001784*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001785
1786Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001787-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001788
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001789- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1790 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1791 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1792
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001793- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1794 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1795 (SF patch #664376.)
1796
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001797- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1798 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1799 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1800 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1801 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1802 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001803 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001804
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001805- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1806 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1807 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1808 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001809 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001810
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001811- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1812 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1813 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1814 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1815 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1816 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1817 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1818 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1819 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1820 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1821 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1822
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001823- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1824 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1825 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1826 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1827 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1828 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1829
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001830- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1831 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1832
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001833- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1834 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1835 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1836 case.)
1837
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001838- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1839 passed as unicode strings.
1840
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001841- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1842 See SF bug #683467.
1843
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001844- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1845 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1846
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001847- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1848
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001849- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1850
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001851- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1852 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1853 arguments.
1854
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001855- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1856 See SF bug #667147.
1857
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001858- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001859 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001860 See SF bug #676155.
1861
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001862- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001863 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001864 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1865 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1866 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1867 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1868 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1869 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001870
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001871Extension modules
1872-----------------
1873
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001874- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1875 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1876 tp_as_number pointer.
1877
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001878- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1879 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1880 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1881 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1882 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1883
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001884- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1885
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001886- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1887
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001888- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001889 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001890 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1891 patch #678531.)
1892
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001893- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1894 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1895
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001896- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1897 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1898
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001899- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1900
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001901- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1902 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1903 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1904
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001905- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1906
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001907- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1908 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1909
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001910- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001911
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001912- datetime changes:
1913
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001914 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1915
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001916 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1917 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1918 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1919 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1920 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1921 now.
1922
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001923 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001924 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1925 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001926
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001927 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001928 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001929 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1930 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1931 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1932 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001933
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001934 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1935 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1936 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001937 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1938
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001939 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1940 by a later example coded by Guido.
1941
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001942 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001943 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1944 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1945 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001946 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1947 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1948
1949 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1950 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1951 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1952 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1953 tzinfo subclass instance.
1954
1955 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1956 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1957 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1958 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1959 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1960 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1961 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1962 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001963
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001964 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1965 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1966 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1967 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1968 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001969 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1970
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001971 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001972
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001973 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1974 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1975 as a naive datetime object.
1976
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001977 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1978 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1979 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1980
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001981 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1982 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1983 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1984 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1985 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1986 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1987 comparison.
1988
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001989 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1990 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1991 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1992 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001993 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001994
1995 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001996
1997 and ::
1998
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001999 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2000
2001 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2002 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2003 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2004 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2005
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002006 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2007 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2008 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2009 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2010 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2011
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002012 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2013 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002014 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2015 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002016
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002017Library
2018-------
2019
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002020- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2021 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2022
2023- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2024 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2025 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2026 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2027 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2028 See PEP 307 for details.
2029
2030- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2031 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2032
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002033- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2034 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002035 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002036 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2037 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002038 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002039
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002040- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2041 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2042
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002043- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2044 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2045 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2046
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002047- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2048
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002049- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2050 exception.
2051
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002052- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2053 class.
2054
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002055- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2056 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2057 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2058
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002059- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2060 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2061
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002062- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002063 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2064 See SF bug #659228.
2065
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002066- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2067 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2068 See SF patch #651082.
2069
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002070- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002071
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002072- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2073 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2074
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002075- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002076 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002077
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002078- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2079 DOS paths from other platforms.
2080
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002081Tools/Demos
2082-----------
2083
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002084- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2085 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2086 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2087 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2088 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2089 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2090 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2091 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2092 example:
2093
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002094 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2095 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002096
2097 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2098
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002099
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002100Build
2101-----
2102
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002103- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2104 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2105 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002106 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2107
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002108 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2109
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002110- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2111 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2112 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2113 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2114 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2115 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2116 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2117 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2118 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2119
2120- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2121 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2122 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2123 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2124
2125- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2126 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2127
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002128C API
2129-----
2130
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002131- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2132 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002133
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002134- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2135 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2136 tp_as_number pointer.
2137
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002138- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2139 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2140 (SF #681367)
2141
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002142- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2143 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2144 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2145 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002146
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002147Tests
2148-----
2149
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002150- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002151 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2152 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2153 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2154 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2155 pydoc.)
2156
2157- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2158
2159- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002160
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002161Windows
2162-------
2163
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002164- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2165 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2166 time).
2167
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002168- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2169 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2170
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002171- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2172 release without strong cryptography.
2173
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002174- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002175 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002176
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002177- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2178 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2179
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002180Mac
2181---
2182
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002183- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2184 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002185
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002186- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2187 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2188 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002189
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002190- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2191 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002192
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002193- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2194 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2195 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2196 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002197
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002198- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002199 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2200 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2201 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002202
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002203
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002204What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002205=================================
2206
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002207*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002208
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002209Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002210--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002211
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002212- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2213
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002214- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2215 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002216 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002217 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002218 a different meaning than before.
2219
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002220- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002221 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002222 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002223
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002224- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002225 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002226 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002227
2228- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2229 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2230 and deallocation.
2231
2232- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2233 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2234
2235- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2236 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2237 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2238 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2239 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2240
2241- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2242 now detected by the garbage collector.
2243
2244- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2245 [SF bug 519621]
2246
2247- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2248 identifier.
2249
2250- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2251 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2252 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2253 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2254 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2255 [SF bug 563060]
2256
2257- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2258 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2259 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2260 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2261 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2262
2263- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2264 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2265 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2266
2267- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2268
2269- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2270 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2271 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2272 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2273 state of the slots would be lost.)
2274
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002275Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002276-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002277
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002278- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002279 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2280 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2281 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2282 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002283 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2284 Jython 2.1.
2285
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002286- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002287 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002288 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2289 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2290 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2291 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2292 these, see PEP 302.
2293
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002294- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2295 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2296 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2297
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002298- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2299 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2300 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2301
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002302- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2303 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2304 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2305
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002306- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2307 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2308 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2309 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2310 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2311 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2312 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2313 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2314 releases or implementations.
2315
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002316- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002317 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2318 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002319
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002320- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2321 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2322
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002323- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2324 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2325 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2326
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002327- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2328 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2329
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002330- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2331 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002332 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2333 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002334
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002335- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2336 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2337 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2338 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2339 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2340
2341 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2342 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2343 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2344 pattern.
2345
2346 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2347 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2348 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2349 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2350
2351 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2352 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2353 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2354 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2355 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2356 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2357
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002358- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2359 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2360 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2361 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2362 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2363 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2364 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2365 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002366
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002367- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2368 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2369 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2370 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2371 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002372 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2373 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2374 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2375 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2376 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2377 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2378 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002379
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002380- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2381 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2382
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002383- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2384 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2385 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2386 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2387 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2388 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2389 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2390 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2391 to Zack Weinberg!
2392
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002393- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2394 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2395 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2396 type. This has been fixed now.
2397
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002398- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2399 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2400 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2401
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002402- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2403 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2404 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2405 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2406 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2407 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2408 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2409 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002410 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002411
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002412- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2413 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2414 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002415
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002416- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2417 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2418 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2419 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2420 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2421 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2422 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2423 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002424 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002425 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2426 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2427
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002428- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2429 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2430 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2431 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2432 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2433 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2434 this.)
2435
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002436- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2437 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002438 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002439 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002440 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2441 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002442 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2443 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002444
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002445- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2446 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2447 currently running.
2448
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002449- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2450 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2451 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2452 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2453
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002454- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2455 as directory names.
2456
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002457- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2458 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2459
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002460- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2461 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2462
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002463- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002464 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2465 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002466
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002467- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2468 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2469 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2470 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2471 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2472
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002473- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2474 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2475 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2476 removed.
2477
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002478- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2479 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2480 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2481
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002482- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2483 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2484 to __debug__.
2485
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002486- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2487 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2488 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2489
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002490- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2491 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2492 deprecated now.
2493
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002494- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2495 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2496 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002497
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002498- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2499 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2500 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2501 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2502 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002503
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002504- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2505 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2506
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002507- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2508 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2509 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002510 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002511 is backward compatible.
2512
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002513- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2514 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2515 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2516 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2517 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2518
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002519- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2520 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2521 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2522 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2523 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2524 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002525
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002526- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2527 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2528
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002529- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2530 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2531
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002532- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2533 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2534 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2535 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2536 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2537
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002538- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2539 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2540 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2541
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002542- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002543 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2544
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002545- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2546 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2547 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002548
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002549- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2550 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2551
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002552- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2553 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2554 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2555
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002556- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2557
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002558Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002559-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002560
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002561- Added three operators to the operator module:
2562 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2563 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2564 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2565
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002566- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2567
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002568- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2569 archives.
2570
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002571- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2572 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2573 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2574
2575 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2576
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002577- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2578 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2579 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002580 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002581
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002582- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2583 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2584 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2585 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002586 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2587 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2588 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2589 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002590
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002591- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2592 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002593
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002594- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2595
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002596- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2597 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2598
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002599- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2600 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2601 supported.
2602
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002603- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2604
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002605- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2606 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002607
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002608- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2609 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2610
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002611- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2612
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002613- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2614 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2615
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002616- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2617 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2618 functions but callable type objects.
2619
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002620- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002621 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002622 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002623
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002624- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2625 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002626
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002627- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2628 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002629
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002630- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2631 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2632 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2633 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2634
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002635- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2636 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002637
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002638- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2639 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2640 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2641 and __imul__.
2642
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002643- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002644 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2645 is called.
2646
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002647- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2648 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2649 interpreter was compiled.
2650
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002651- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2652 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2653 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002654 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002655 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2656 1, not 2.
2657
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002658- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2659 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2660 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2661 limit.
2662
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002663- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2664 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2665 bug #623464.
2666
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002667- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2668 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2669 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2670 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2671
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002672Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002673-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002674
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002675- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2676
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002677- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2678 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2679 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2680 with Python 2.3a2.
2681
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002682- os.path exposes getctime.
2683
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002684- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002685 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002686 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002687 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002688 unit tests of floating point results.
2689
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002690- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2691 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2692 has been increased.
2693
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002694- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2695 executed.
2696
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002697- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2698 postinstallation script.
2699
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002700- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2701 test the current module.
2702
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002703- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002704 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2705 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2706 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2707 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2708
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002709- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002710 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002711 Ward's Optik package.
2712
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002713- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2714 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2715 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2716 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2717
2718- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2719 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002720 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002721
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002722- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2723 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2724 shelf are binary pickles.
2725
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002726- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2727 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2728
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002729- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2730 modules are iterators now.
2731
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002732- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2733 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2734 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2735 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2736 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2737 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002738
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002739- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2740 with their entity value.
2741
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002742- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2743
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002744- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2745 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002746
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002747- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2748 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002749 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002750
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002751- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2752 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2753 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2754 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2755 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2756 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2757 main():
2758
2759 import locale
2760 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2761
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002762- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2763 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2764
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002765- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2766 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2767 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2768 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2769 to the new standard.
2770
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002771- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2772 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2773 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2774 an extension to the database.
2775
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002776- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2777 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2778 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2779 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002780 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002781
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002782- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002783 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002784
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002785- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2786 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2787 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2788 bounded integers.
2789
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002790- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2791 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2792 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2793 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2794 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2795 in existence.
2796
2797 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2798 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2799 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2800 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2801 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2802 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2803
2804 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2805 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2806 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2807 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2808
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002809- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2810 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2811 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2812
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002813- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2814
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002815- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2816 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2817 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2818 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2819
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002820- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2821 argument.
2822
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002823- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2824 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2825 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2826 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2827 [SF patch 560794].
2828
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002829- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2830 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2831 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002832 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2833 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2834 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002835
2836- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2837 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002838
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002839- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2840 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2841 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2842 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002843
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002844- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2845 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2846 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2847 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2848 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2849
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002850- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002851
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002852- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2853
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002854- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2855 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2856 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2857 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2858 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2859 identical to None.
2860
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002861- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2862 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2863 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2864 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2865 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2866 results now.
2867
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002868- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2869 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2870
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002871- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2872 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2873 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2874 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2875 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2876 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2877 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2878 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2879
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002880- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2881
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002882- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2883 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2884
2885- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2886 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2887 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2888 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2889 and other systems.
2890
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002891- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2892 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2893 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2894 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 +00002895 work well with these.
2896
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002897- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2898
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002899- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002900 connections.
2901
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002902- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2903 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2904 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2905
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002906- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2907 sets
2908
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002909- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2910 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2911 name.
2912
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002913- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2914 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2915 passed in.
2916
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002917- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002918 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002919 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2920 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002921
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002922- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2923
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002924- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2925
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002926- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2927 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2928 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2929
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002930- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2931 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2932 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2933 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002934 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002935
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002936- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002937 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002938 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002939
2940- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2941 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2942 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2943
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002944- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002945 the value of its expression argument.
2946
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002947- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2948 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2949 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2950
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002951- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2952 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2953 skipstone browser was included.
2954
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002955- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2956 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2957
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002958Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002959-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002960
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002961- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2962 names in addition to accepting file names.
2963
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002964- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2965 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2966 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2967 still used and useful.)
2968
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002969- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2970 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2971 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2972 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002973
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002974- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2975 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2976 the generated binary.
2977
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002978Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002979-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002980
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002981- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2982
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002983- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2984 except in the hands of experts.
2985
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002986- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002987 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2988 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2989 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002990
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002991- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2992 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2993 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2994 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2995 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2996 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2997 builds.
2998
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002999- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3000 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3001 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3002 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3003 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3004 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3005 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3006 new type.
3007
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003008- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003009
3010 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3011 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3012 positive infinities.
3013
3014 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3015 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3016 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3017 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3018 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3019 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3020 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3021
3022 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3023
3024 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3025
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003026- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3027 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3028 size of the executable.
3029
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003030- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3031 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3032 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3033 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003034
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003035- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3036
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003037- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3038 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3039 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003040
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003041- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3042 well as Unix.
3043
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003044- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3045 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3046 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3047 modules in the README file for details.
3048
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003049C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003050-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003051
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003052- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3053 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003054 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003055 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003056 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003057
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003058- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3059 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3060 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3061 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3062 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3063 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003064 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003065 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3066 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3067 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3068 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3069 aligned.)
3070
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003071- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3072 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3073 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3074
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003075- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3076 level.
3077
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003078- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3079 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3080 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3081 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3082 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3083
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003084- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3085 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3086 code.
3087
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003088- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3089 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3090 adjusting for negative indices.
3091
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003092- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3093 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3094 object.
3095
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003096- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3097 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3098 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3099
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003100- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3101 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003102
3103- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3104
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003105- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3106 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3107 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3108 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3109
3110- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3111
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003112- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003113
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003114- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003115 without going through the buffer API.
3116
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003117- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003118
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003119- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3120 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3121 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3122 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3123
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003124- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3125 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3126
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003127- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003128 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3129
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003130New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003132
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003133- OpenVMS is now supported.
3134
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003135- AtheOS is now supported.
3136
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003137- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3138
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003139- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3140
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003141Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003142-----
3143
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003144- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3145 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3146 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003147
3148Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003149-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003150
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003151- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3152 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3153 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3154 bugs.
3155 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003156 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003157 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3158 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003159 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003160
3161- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003162 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003163
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003164- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3165 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3166
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003167- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3168 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003169 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003170 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3171
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003172- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3173 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3174 use files" uninstall option).
3175
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003176- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3177
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003178- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3179 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3180
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003181- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3182 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3183 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3184
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003185- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3186 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3187 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3188 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3189 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003190 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3191 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3192 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003193
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003194- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003195 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003196 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3197 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3198 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3199 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3200 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3201 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3202 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3203 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3204 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3205 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3206 work around.
3207
3208- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3209 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3210 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3211 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3212 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3213 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3214 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3215 specified with O_CREAT too).
3216
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003217Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003218----
3219
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003220- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003221
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003222- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3223 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3224 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3225
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003226- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3227 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3228 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3229
3230- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3231 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3232 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3233 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3234 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3235 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3236 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3237 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003238
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003239- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3240 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3241 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003242
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003243- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3244 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3245 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3246 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3247 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003248
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003249- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3250 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3251 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003252
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003253- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3254 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003255
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003256- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3257 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3258 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3259 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3260 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003261
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003262- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3263 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3264 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3265
3266- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3267 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3268 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003269
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003270- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3271 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3272 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3273 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003274 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003275
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003276- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3277 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003278
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003279- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3280 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003281
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003282- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003283 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003284 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3285 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003286
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003287
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003288What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003289===============================
3290
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003291*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3292
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003293Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003294--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003295
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003296- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3297 with a custom metaclass.
3298
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003299Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003300-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003301
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003302- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3303 are proxies.
3304
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003305Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003306-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003307
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003308- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3309 very short strings.
3310
3311- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3312 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3313 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3314 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3315 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3316
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003317Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003318-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003319
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003320- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3321 close or delete time).
3322
3323- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3324 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3325
3326- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3327
3328- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003329 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003330
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003331Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003332-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003333
3334Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003335-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003336
3337C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003338-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003339
3340New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003341-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003342
3343Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003344-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003345
3346Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003347-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003348
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003349- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3350
3351- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3352 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3353
3354- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3355 deleted at process exit time.
3356
3357- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3358 in backslash.
3359
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003360Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003362
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003363- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3364 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3365 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3366
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003367
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003368What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003369===========================
3370
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003371*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3372
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003373Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003374--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003375
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003376- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3377 been extensively updated. See
3378
3379 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3380
3381 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3382
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003383- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3384 deleted!
3385
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003386- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3387 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3388 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3389 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3390 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3391
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003392- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3393
3394 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3395 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3396
3397 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3398 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3399 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3400 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3401 supported anyway.
3402
3403 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3404 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3405
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003406- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3407 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3408 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3409 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3410 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003411
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003412- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3413 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3414 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3415
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003416Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003417-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003418
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003419- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3420 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3421 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3422 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3423 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3424 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003425 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3426 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3427 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3428 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003429
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003430- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3431 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3432 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3433
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003434Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003436
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003437- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3438
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003439Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003440-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003441
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003442- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3443 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3444 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3445 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3446 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3447 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3448
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003449- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3450
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003451- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3452
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003453- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3454
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003455- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3456 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3457 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3458
3459- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3460
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003461Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003462-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003463
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003464- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3465 off a search on Google.
3466
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003467Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003468-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003469
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003470- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3471 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3472 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3473 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3474 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3475 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3476 other platforms should do likewise.
3477
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003478- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3479 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3480 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3481
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003482C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003484
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003485- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3486 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3487 producing key-value pairs.
3488
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003489- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003490 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003491 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3492 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3493 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3494 previously went unchallenged.
3495
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003496New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003497-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003498
3499Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003500-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003501
3502Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003504
3505Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003506----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003507
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003508- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3509 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003510
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003511- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3512 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3513 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3514 home.
3515
3516
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003517What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003518===========================
3519
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3521
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003522Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003524
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003525- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3526 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003527
3528 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003529 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003530
3531 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3532 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003533 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003534 This needs to be documented.
3535
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003536- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3537 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3538
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003539- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3540 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3541 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3542
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003543- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3544 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3545
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003546- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3547 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3548 class forbids it).
3549
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003550- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3551 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3552 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3553
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003554- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3555
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003556Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003557-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003558
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003559- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3560 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003561 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003562
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003563- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3564 (like 1 + '').
3565
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003566Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003567-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003568
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003569- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3570 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3571 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3572 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003573 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003574 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3575
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003576- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3577 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3578 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3579 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3580
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003581- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3582 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003583 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3584 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3585 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003586
3587- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3588 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003589
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003590- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3591 bytes on its input.
3592
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003593Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003594-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003595
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003596- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003597 convenience function.
3598
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003599- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3600 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3601 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003602 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3603 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3604 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3605 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3606 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3607 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003608
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003609- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3610 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3611 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3612 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3613
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003614- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3615 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3616 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3617
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003618- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3619 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3620 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3621 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3622
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003623- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3624 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003626 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3627 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3628 new -l and -e options.
3629
3630- statcache is now deprecated.
3631
3632- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3633 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003634 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003635 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3636 time properly taken into account.
3637
3638- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3639 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3640 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3641 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3642
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003643Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003644-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003645
3646Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003647-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003648
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003649- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3650 is built with libdb3 if available.
3651
3652- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3653
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003654C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003655-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003656
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003657- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3658 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3659 PySequence_Size().
3660
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003661- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3662
3663- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3664 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3665 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3666
3667- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3668 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3669
3670- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3671 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3672
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003673New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003675
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003676- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3677 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3678
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003679- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3680 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3681
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003682- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3683
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003684Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003686
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003687- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3688 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3689
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003690Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003692
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003693Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003695
3696- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3697 removed completely in the next release.
3698
3699- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3700 OSX.
3701
3702- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3703 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3704
3705- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3706
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003707
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003708What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003709===========================
3710
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003711*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3712
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003713Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003714--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003715
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003716- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003717 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003718 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003719 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3720 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003721 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3722 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003723 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3724 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003725
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003726- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3727 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3728
3729- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3730 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3731
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003732Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003733-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003734
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003735- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3736 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3737 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3738 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3739 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3740 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3741 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3742 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3743
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003744- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3745 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3746 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3747 example).
3748
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003749- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003750 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003751 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003752 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003753
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003754- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3755 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3756 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003757 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003758
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003759- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3760 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3761 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3762 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3763 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3764 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3765
3766 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3767
3768 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3769
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003770Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003772
3773- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3774
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003775- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3776
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003777- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3778 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003779
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003780- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3781 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3782 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3783 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3784 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3785 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003786 attributes.
3787
3788- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3789 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3790 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003791
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003792- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3793 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3794 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003795
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003796- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3797 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3798 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003799 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3800 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3801
3802- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3803 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003804
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003805Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003807
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003808- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3809 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3810
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003811- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3812 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3813 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3814 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3815
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003816- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3817 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3818 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3819 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3820
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003821 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3822 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3823 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3824 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3825 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3826 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3827 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3828 without losing information).
3829
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003830- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003831 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3832 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3833 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3834 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3835 module).
3836
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003837 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003838 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3839 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3840 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3841 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003842
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003843- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003844 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3845 encoding.
3846
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003847- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3848 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3849
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003851 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3852
3853- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3854 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3855 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3856 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3857
3858- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3859
3860- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3861 ON, and OFF.
3862
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003863- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3864 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3865
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003866Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003867-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003868
3869- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3870 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3871 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003872
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003873- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3874 been added: -X and -E.
3875
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003876Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003877-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003878
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003879- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3880 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3881
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003882C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003883-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003884
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003885- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3886 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3887 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3888 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3889 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3890
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003891- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3892 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3893 as long) arguments.
3894
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003895- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3896 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3897 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3898 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3899 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3900 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3901
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003902- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3903 input.
3904
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003905New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003907
3908Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003909-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003910
3911Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003913
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003914- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3915 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3916 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3917
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003918- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3919 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3920 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003921 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003922
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003923 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3924 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3925 import signal
3926 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003927
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003928 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003929 while 1:
3930 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003932 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3933 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3934 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3935 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003936
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003937
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003938What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3939===========================
3940
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003941*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3942
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003943Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003944--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003945
3946- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3947 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3948 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3949
3950- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3951 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3952 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3953 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3954 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3955 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3956 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003957
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003958- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003959 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003960 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3961 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3962 associate a docstring with a property.
3963
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003964- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3965 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3966 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3967 other built-in object types.
3968
3969- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3970 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3971 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3972 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3973 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3974
3975- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3976 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3977
3978- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3979 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003980 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003981 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3982 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3983 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3984 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3985 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3986
3987- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3988 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3989 class.
3990
3991- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3992 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3993 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3994 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3995
3996- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3997 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3998 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3999 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4000
4001- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4002 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4003
4004- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4005 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4006 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4007 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4008 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004009 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004010 with the same value as s.
4011
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004012- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4013
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004014Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004015----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004016
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004017- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4018
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004019- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4020 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4021 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4022 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4023 objects.
4024
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004025- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4026 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004027 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4028 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4029
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004030- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4031 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4032 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4033
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004034Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004036
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004037- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4038 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4039 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4040 by the instances.
4041
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004042- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4043 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4044 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4045
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004046- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4047 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4048 before the entire comparison is complete.
4049
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004050- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4051 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4052 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4053
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004054- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4055 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4056 getwriter().
4057
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004058- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4059 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4060
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004061- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004062 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4063 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4064
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004065- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4066 iterable object.
4067
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004068- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4069 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004070
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004071- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4072 authentication.
4073
4074- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4075 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004076
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004077- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004078 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4079 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4080 a sample driver.)
4081
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004082Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004084
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004085- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4086 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4087 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4088 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4089 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4090 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4091 kernel has large file support.
4092
4093- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4094 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4095 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4096 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4097 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4098
4099- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4100 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4101 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4102
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004103C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004104-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004105
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004106- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4107 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4108
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004109New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004111
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004112- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4113 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4114
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004115Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004117
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004118- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4119 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4120 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4121 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4122 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4123
4124- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4125 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4126 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4127 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4128
4129- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4130 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4131
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004132Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004134
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004135- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004136 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4137 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004138
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004139
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004140What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4141===========================
4142
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4144
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004145Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004147
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004148- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4149 big to represent as a C double.
4150
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004151- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4152 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4153 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4154 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4155 restriction).
4156
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004157- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4158 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4159 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4160 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4161 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4162
4163 >>> dir([])
4164 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4165 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4166 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4167 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4168 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4169 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4170 'reverse', 'sort']
4171
4172 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4173
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004174- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004175 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4176 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4177 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4178 OverflowError exception.
4179
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004180- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004181 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004182 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4183 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4184 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4185 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4186 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004187 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4189 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4190
4191 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4192 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4193 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4194 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004195
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004196- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004197 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4198 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4199 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4200 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4201 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4202 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4203 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4204 once it is created.
4205
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004206- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4207 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4208 (key, value) pairs.
4209
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004210- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004211 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4212 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4213
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004214- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4215 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4216 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4217 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4218 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004219
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004220- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004221 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4222 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4223
4224 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4225
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004226- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004227 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4228
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004229Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004230-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004231
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004232- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004233 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4234 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004235
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004236- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4237 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4238 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4239 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4240 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4241 in this area anymore).
4242
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004243- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4244 threading.Timer.
4245
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004246- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4247 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4248
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004249- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004250 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4251
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004252- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004253 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4254 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4255 converted to Python longs.
4256
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004257- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004258 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4259
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004260- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4261 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4262 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4263
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004264Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004266
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004267- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4268 division operators as per PEP 238.
4269
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004270Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004272
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004273- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4274 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4275 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4276 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4277
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004278C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004280
4281- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004282
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004283- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4284 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004285 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004286
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004287 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4288 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004289 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004290 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004291
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004292- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004293 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4294 module:
4295
4296 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004297
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004298 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4299 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004300
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004301 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4302 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004303
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004304 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4305
4306 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4307
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004308- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004309 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4310 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4311 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004312
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004313New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004315
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004316- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4317 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4318 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4319 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4320 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004321
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004322Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004324
4325Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004326-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004327
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004328- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4329 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4330 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4331 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004332 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4333 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4334 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4335 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4336 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004337
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004338- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004339 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4340
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004341
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004342What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4343===========================
4344
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4346
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004347Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004349
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004350- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4351 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4352
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004353- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4354 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4355 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004356
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004357- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4358 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4359 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4360 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004361
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004362- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4363
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004365
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004366Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004368
4369- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004370 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004371 the module docstring for details.
4372
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004373Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004374-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004375
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004376- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004377 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4378 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4379 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004380
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004381- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4382 Nick Mathewson.
4383
4384Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004385----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004386
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004387- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4388 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4389 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4390 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4391 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4392 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4393 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4394 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4395
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004396- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4397 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4398 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4399 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4400
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004401- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4402 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4403 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4404 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4405 come a long way).
4406
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004407- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4408 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4409 write filters for these warnings).
4410
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004411- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4412 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4413 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4414 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4415 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4416
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004417- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4418 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4419 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4420 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4421 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4422 older distribution.
4423
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004424Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004426
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004427- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4428 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004429 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004430
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004431- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4432 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4433 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4434
4435- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4436
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004437- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4438
4439- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4440
4441- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4442
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004443- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004444
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004445- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4446
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004447New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004449
4450C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004452
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004453- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4454 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4455 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4456 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4457 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4458 against buffer overruns.
4459
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004460- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004461 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4462 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004463 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4464 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4465 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4466
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004467- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4468 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4469 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4470 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4471 deprecated.
4472
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004473Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004475
4476- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4477 relevant is found.
4478
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004479
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004480What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004481===========================
4482
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4484
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004485Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004486----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004487
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004488- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4489 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4490 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4491 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4492 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4493 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4494 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4495 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004496 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004497 repaired.
4498
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004499- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004500 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004501 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4502 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4503 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4504 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4505 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4506 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4507 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4508 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4509
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004510- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4511 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4512 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4513 leading BMO character).
4514
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004515- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4516 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4517 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4518
4519 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4520 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4521 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004522
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004523 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4524 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4525 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4526 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4527 for various simple to use conversions.
4528
4529 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4530 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4531
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4533 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4534 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4535 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4536 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4537 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4538 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4539 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4540 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4541 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4542 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4543 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4544 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4545 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4546 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004547
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004548- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4549 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4550 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004551 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004552 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004553
4554 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004555 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4556 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4557 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4558 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4559 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004560 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4561 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004562
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004563 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4564 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4565 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004566 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004567
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004568- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4569 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4570 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4571 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4572 floating arithmetic,
4573
4574 x = 9007199254740992.0
4575 print long(x)
4576
4577 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4578 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4579 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4580 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4581 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4582 functions are of good quality).
4583
4584 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4585 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4586 algorithms to break.
4587
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004588- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4589 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4590 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4591 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4592 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4593 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4594 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4595 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4596 order.
4597
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004598- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4599 operation along the most common code paths.
4600
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004601- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4602 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4603
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004604- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4605 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4606 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4607 {}.update(UserDict())
4608
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004609- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4610 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4611 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4612 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4613 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4614 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4615 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4616 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4617
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004618- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004619 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004621 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004622 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4623 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004624 join() method of strings
4625 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004626 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4627 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004629 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004630
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004631- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4632 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4633
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004634- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4635 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4636
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004637- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4638 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4639 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4640 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4641
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004642- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4643 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004644 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004645 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4646 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004647
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004648- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4649
4650
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004651Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004652-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004653
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004654- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004655 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004656 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4657 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4658
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004659- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4660 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4661
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004662- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4663 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4664 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4665 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4666
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004667- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4668 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4669 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4670
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004671- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4672
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004673- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4674
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004675- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4676 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4677 that are still imported into string.py).
4678
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004679- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4680
4681- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4682 Now it does.
4683
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004684- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4685
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004686- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4687 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4688 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4689 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4690 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004691 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4692 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004693
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004694- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4695 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4696 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4697 'help(object)'.
4698
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004699Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004701
4702- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004703 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004704 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4705 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4706
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004707- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004708 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4709 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004710
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004711C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004713
4714- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4715 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004716
4717----
4718
4719**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**