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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000015- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
16 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
17 be there.
18
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000019- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
20 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
21 the LC_NUMERIC category.
22
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000023- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
24 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
25 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
26
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000027- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
28
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000029- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
30 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
31 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000032
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000033- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
34 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
35
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000036- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
37
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000038- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
39 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
40
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000041- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
42
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000043- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
44
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000045- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
46 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
47
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000048- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
49 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
50 Fixes bug #858016 .
51
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000052- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
53 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
54 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
55
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000056- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
57 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
58 improves their performance (about 35%).
59
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000060- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
61 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
62 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
63
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000064- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
65 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
66 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
67 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
68
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000069- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
70 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
71 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
72 length is not known).
73
74- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
75 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000076 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
77 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000078 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
79
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000080- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
81 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
82
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000083- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
84 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
85 keyword arguments.
86
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000087- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
88 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
89 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
90
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000091- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
92 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
93 cases.
94
95- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
96 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
97 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
98 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
99 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
100 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
101 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
102 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
103 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
104 a release build.
105
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000106- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
107 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
108
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000109- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000110 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000111
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000112- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
113 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
114 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
115 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
116 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
117 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
118 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
119 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
120 destroyed.
121
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000122- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
123 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
124 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
125 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
126 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
127 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
128 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
129 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
130
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000131- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
132 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
133 character other than a space.
134
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000135- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
136 by the function object or by the method object, the function
137 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
138 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
139 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
140 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
141 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
142 attributes with the same name.
143
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000144- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
145 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
146 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
147 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
148 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
149 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
150 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
151 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
152 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
153 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
154 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
155 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
156 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
157 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000158
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000159- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
160 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
161 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
162 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
163 This has been repaired.
164
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000165- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
166
167- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
168
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000169- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
170 over a sequence.
171
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000172- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000173 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000174
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000175- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
176
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000177- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
178 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
179 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
180 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
181 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
182 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
183 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
184 records with equal keys is unchanged).
185
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000186- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
187 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
188 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
189
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000190- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
191 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
192 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
193 freelist.
194
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000195- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
196 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
197
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000198- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
199 number.
200
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000201- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
202 a TypeError exception.
203
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000204- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
205 820195.
206
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000207- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
208 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
209 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
210
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000211- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
212 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
213 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000214
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000215- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
216 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
217 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
218
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000219- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
220 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000221 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000222
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000223- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000224 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
225 the first call.
226
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000227
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000228Extension modules
229-----------------
230
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000231- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
232
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000233- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
234
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000235- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
236 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
237
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000238- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
239 fewer false positives.
240
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000241- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
242 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
243
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000244- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
245 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
246
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000247- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
248 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000249 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
250 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
251 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000252
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000253- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
254 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
255 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
256 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
257
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000258- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
259 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
260 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
261 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
262 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
263 #897625.
264
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000265- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
266 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
267
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000268- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
269 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
270 and pops on either side of the deque.
271
272- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
273 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
274
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000275- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
276 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
277 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
278 other functions that expect a function argument.
279
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000280- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
281
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000282- os.getsid was added.
283
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000284- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
285 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
286 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
287
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000288- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
289
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000290- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
291
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000292- readline.clear_history was added.
293
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000294- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
295
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000296- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
297
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000298- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
299
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000300- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
301
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000302- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
303
304- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
305
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000306- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
307
308- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
309
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000310- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
311 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
312 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
313
314- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
315 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
316 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
317 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
318 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
319 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
320 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
321
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000322- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
323 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
324 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
325 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000326
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000327- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
328 iterators from a single iterable.
329
330- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
331 of raising a TypeError exception.
332
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000333- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
334 as parameter.
335
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000336Library
337-------
338
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000339- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
340 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
341
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000342- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
343
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000344- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
345 on cygwin and mingw32.
346
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000347- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
348
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000349- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
350 module.
351
Martin v. Löwiseac324b2004-06-03 09:18:35 +0000352- asyncore.loop now has repeat count parameter that defaults to infinity.
353
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000354- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
355 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
356 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
357
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000358- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
359 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
360 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
361
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000362- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
363
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000364- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
365
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000366- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
367 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
368
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000369- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
370 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
371 type pattern with the same value exists.
372
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000373- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
374 when run from the command prompt).
375
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000376- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
377 not taken into consideration when caching value.
378
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000379- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
380 default sort).
381
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000382- Added global runctx function to profile module
383
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000384- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
385
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000386- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
387
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000388- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
389
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000390- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
391 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
392 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
393 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
394 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
395 accordingly.
396
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000397- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
398 decoding standards.
399
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000400- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
401 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
402 called for all requests.
403
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000404- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
405 they are passed to the compiler.
406
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000407- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
408 indent, width and depth.
409
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000410- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
411 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
412
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000413- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
414 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
415
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000416- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
417
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000418- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
419
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000420- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
421
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000422- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
423 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
424
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000425- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000426 for better performance.
427
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000428- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000429
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000430- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
431 a string).
432
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000433- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
434
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000435- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
436
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000437- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
438
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000439- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
440
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000441- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
442 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
443 list of fieldnames.
444
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000445- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
446 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
447
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000448- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
449
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000450- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
451 empty lists.
452
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000453- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
454 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
455 and shelves.
456
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000457- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
458 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
459
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000460- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000461 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
462 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000463
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000464- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
465 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000466 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000467
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000468- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000469 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
470 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
471
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000472- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
473 and removed in Py2.4.
474
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000475- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
476
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000477- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
478
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000479Tools/Demos
480-----------
481
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000482- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
483 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
484
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000485- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
486
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000487- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
488 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
489 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
490 destination in situations where both files are given.
491
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000492- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
493 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
494 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
495 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
496
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000497- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
498
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000499- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
500 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
501 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
502 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
503 now.
504
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000505- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
506 in effect
507
508- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
509 C-c C-h
510
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000511- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
512 -d option was given.
513
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000514Build
515-----
516
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000517- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
518 is configured --with-tsc.
519
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000520- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
521 on AMD64.
522
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000523- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
524 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
525
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000526- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
527 removed.
528
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000529- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
530 supported (see PEP 11).
531
532- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
533
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000534- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
535
536- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
537 (see PEP 11).
538
539- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
540 sizeof(char) must be 1.
541
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000542C API
543-----
544
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000545- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
546 generator objects.
547
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000548- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
549 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000550 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
551 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000552
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000553- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
554 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
555
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000556- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
557 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
558 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
559 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
560 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
561
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000562- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
563 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
564 about 10% faster.
565
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000566- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
567 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
568
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000569- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
570 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
571 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
572 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
573
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000574New platforms
575-------------
576
577Tests
578-----
579
580Windows
581-------
582
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000583- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
584 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
585 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
586 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
587
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000588- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
589 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
590 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
591
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000592Mac
593----
594
595
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000596What's New in Python 2.3 final?
597===============================
598
599*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
600
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000601IDLE
602----
603
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000604- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
605 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
606 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
607 context-menu actions.
608
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000609- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
610 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
611 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
612 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
613 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
614 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
615 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
616 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
617 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
618
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000619
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000620What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
621=============================================
622
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000623*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000624
625Core and builtins
626-----------------
627
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000628- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000629 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000630 comment at the end are still unsupported.
631
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000632Extension modules
633-----------------
634
635- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
636 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
637 than once. This has been fixed.
638
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000639- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
640 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
641 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
642 call.
643
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000644- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
645
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000646Library
647-------
648
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000649- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
650 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
651
652- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
653 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
654 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
655 restored.
656
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000657IDLE
658----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000659
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000660- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000661
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000662Build
663-----
664
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000665- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
666 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
667
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000668C API
669-----
670
671Windows
672-------
673
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000674- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
675 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
676
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000677- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
678
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000679Mac
680---
681
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000682- Various fixes to pimp.
683
684- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
685
686- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
687 more problems than it solves.
688
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000689
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000690What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
691=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000692
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000693*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
694
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000695Core and builtins
696-----------------
697
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000698- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
699 by sys.setcheckinterval().
700
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000701- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
702 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000703 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000704
705- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
706 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
707 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000708 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000709
710- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
711 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000712
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000713- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
714 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
715 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
716
717- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000718 770247.
719
720- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000721
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000722Extension modules
723-----------------
724
725- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
726 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
727
728- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
729
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000730- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
731
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000732- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
733 contained within the _strptime module.
734
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000735- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
736 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
737
738- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000739 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
740
741- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
742 the find_class attribute, if present.
743
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000744- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000745
746 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
747 (SF bug 763298).
748
749 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000750 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
751 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
752 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000753
754 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
755
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000756Library
757-------
758
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000759- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
760
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000761- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
762 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
763 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
764 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
765 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
766 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
767 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
768 or Tester().
769
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000770- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
771 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
772 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
773 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
774 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
775 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
776 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
777 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
778 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000779
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000780 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000781
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000782- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
783 weren't before was an oversight.
784
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000785- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
786 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
787
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000788- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
789 when there are no lines.
790
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000791- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
792 which could occur with Tk 8.4
793
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000794- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
795 to child processes.
796
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000797- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
798
799- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
800
801- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
802 xmlrpclib.
803
804- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
805 responses.
806
807- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
808 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
809
810- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
811 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
812 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
813
814- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
815 used as patterns.
816
817- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
818 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
819 than Tk 8.3.
820
821- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
822
823- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000824
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000825Tools/Demos
826-----------
827
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000828- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
829
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000830- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
831
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000832- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000833
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000834Build
835-----
836
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000837- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
838
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000839- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
840
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000841- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
842 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000843
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000844- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
845 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
846 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000847
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000848C API
849-----
850
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000851- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
852 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
853
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000854Windows
855-------
856
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000857- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
858 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
859 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
860 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
861 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
862 Python exception ::
863
864 thread.error: can't start new thread
865
866 is raised now.
867
868- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
869 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
870 instead of from DLL teardown.
871
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000872Mac
873---
874
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000875- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000876 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000877 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
878 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
879 the executable in the bundle.
880
881- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000882
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000883- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
884
885- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
886 on Panther.
887
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000888What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
889================================
890
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000891*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000892
893Core and builtins
894-----------------
895
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000896- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
897 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
898 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
899 with the -i option.
900
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000901- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
902 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
903
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000904- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
905 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
906
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000907- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
908 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
909 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
910 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
911 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
912 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
913 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
914 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
915 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
916 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
917 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
918 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
919 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000920
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000921- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
922 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
923 embedded in a lambda expression.
924
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000925- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
926 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
927 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
928 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
929 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
930
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000931- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
932 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
933 matches the restriction on classic classes.
934
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000935- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
936 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
937
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000938- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
939 It's writable again.
940
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000941- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
942 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
943 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000944 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000945
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000946- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
947 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
948 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
949
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000950Extension modules
951-----------------
952
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000953- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
954 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
955
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000956- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
957 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
958 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
959 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
960
961- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
962 collection.
963
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000964- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
965 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
966 unique within a single program run.
967
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000968- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
969 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
970
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000971- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
972 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
973
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000974- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
975 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000976
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000977- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
978
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000979- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
980 Fixes SF bug #730685.
981
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000982- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
983 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
984 for many BSD-derived systems.
985
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000986
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000987Library
988-------
989
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000990- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
991 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
992 primary ones:
993
994 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
995 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
996 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
997
998 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
999 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1000 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1001 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1002 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1003 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1004
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001005- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1006 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1007 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1008 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1009 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1010 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1011 argument.
1012
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001013- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1014 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1015 in the archive.
1016
1017- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1018 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1019
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001020- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1021 569574).
1022
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001023- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1024 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1025 no more.
1026
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001027- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1028 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1029 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1030 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1031 code coverage.
1032
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001033- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1034 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1035 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001036 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1037 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001038
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001039- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1040 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1041 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001042 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001043
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001044- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1045
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001046- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1047 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1048 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1049 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1050
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001051- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1052 handling.
1053
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001054- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1055 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1056
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001057- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1058 in socket.py.
1059
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001060- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1061
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001062- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1063 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1064 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1065 opener with proxy support.
1066
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001067- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1068
1069- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1070
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001071Tools/Demos
1072-----------
1073
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001074- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1075
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001076- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1077
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001078- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1079 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001080
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001081- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1082 files.
1083
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001084Build
1085-----
1086
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001087- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001088 different root directory.
1089
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001090C API
1091-----
1092
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001093- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1094 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1095 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1096 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1097 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1098 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1099 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1100 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1101 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1102 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1103
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001104- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1105 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1106 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1107 from Python.
1108
1109
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001110New platforms
1111-------------
1112
1113None this time.
1114
1115Tests
1116-----
1117
1118- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1119 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1120
1121Windows
1122-------
1123
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001124- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1125
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001126- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1127 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1128 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1129 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1130 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1131 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1132 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1133 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1134 that's what it's for.
1135
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001136Mac
1137---
1138
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001139- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1140 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1141 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1142 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001143- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1144 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1145- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001146
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001147SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1148------------------------------------
1149
1150430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1151598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1152622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1153661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1154683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1155697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1156713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1157724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1158727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1159729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1160730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1161731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1162732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1163733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1164735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1165740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1166744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1167745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1168747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1169749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1170751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1171753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1172755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1173757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1174760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1175
1176
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001177What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1178================================
1179
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001180*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001181
1182Core and builtins
1183-----------------
1184
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001185- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1186 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1187
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001188- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1189 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1190 and cannot be strings).
1191
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001192- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1193 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1194 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1195 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1196
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001197- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1198 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1199 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1200 Python itself.
1201
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001202- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1203 the referenced object, if it has one.
1204
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001205- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1206 the thread started at
1207 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1208
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001209- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1210 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1211 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1212 placed on a list index.
1213
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001214- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1215 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1216 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1217 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1218
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001219- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1220 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1221 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1222 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1223 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1224 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1225 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1226
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001227- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1228 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1229 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1230 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1231 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1232
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001233- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1234 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001235
1236- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1237 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1238 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1239 #693195.)
1240
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001241- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1242 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001243
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001244- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001245 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001246 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1247 interpreter executions, would fail.
1248
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001249- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001250 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001251 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001252
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001253Extension modules
1254-----------------
1255
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001256- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1257 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1258 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1259 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1260
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001261- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1262 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1263
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001264- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1265 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1266 and Greg Chapman.)
1267
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001268- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1269 recursively.
1270
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001271- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001272 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1273 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1274 leaks.
1275
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001276- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1277
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001278- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1279 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1280 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1281 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1282 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1283 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1284 #705836.
1285
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001286- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001287 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1288
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001289- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1290 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1291 See SF bug #692416.
1292
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001293- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1294 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1295
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001296- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1297 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1298 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001299
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001300- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001301 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1302 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1303
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001304- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1305 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1306 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1307 timeouts to work properly.
1308
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001309Library
1310-------
1311
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001312- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1313 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1314 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1315 future release.
1316
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001317- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1318 for querying platform dependent features.
1319
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001320- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001321
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001322- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1323 pickle protocol versions.
1324
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001325- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1326 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1327 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1328
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001329- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1330
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001331- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1332 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1333 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1334 modules.
1335
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001336- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1337 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1338 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1339
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001340- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1341 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1342
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001343- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1344 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1345 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1346
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001347- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001348 MS Office extensions.
1349
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001350- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1351 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1352
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001353- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1354 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1355
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001356- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1357 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1358 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1359 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1360 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1361 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1362
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001363- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1364 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1365 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001366
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001367- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1368 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1369 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1370
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001371- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1372
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001373- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1374 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1375 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1376
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001377Tools/Demos
1378-----------
1379
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001380- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1381 See the module docstring for details.
1382
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001383Build
1384-----
1385
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001386- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1387 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001388
1389C API
1390-----
1391
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001392- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1393
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001394- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1395 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1396 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1397
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001398- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1399 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001400
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001401 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1402 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1403 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001404
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001405- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001406 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1407
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001408- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1409 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1410 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001411
1412New platforms
1413-------------
1414
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001415None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001416
1417Tests
1418-----
1419
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001420- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1421 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001422
1423Windows
1424-------
1425
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001426- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1427 function.
1428
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001429- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1430 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001431
1432Mac
1433---
1434
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001435- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1436 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001437
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001438- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1439 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001440
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001441- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1442 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1443 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001444
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001445- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001446 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1447 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001448
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001449- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1450 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001451
1452
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001453What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1454=================================
1455
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001456*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001457
1458Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001459-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001460
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001461- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1462 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1463 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1464
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001465- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1466 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1467 (SF patch #664376.)
1468
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001469- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1470 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1471 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1472 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1473 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1474 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001475 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001476
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001477- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1478 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1479 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1480 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001481 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001482
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001483- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1484 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1485 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1486 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1487 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1488 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1489 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1490 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1491 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1492 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1493 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1494
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001495- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1496 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1497 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1498 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1499 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1500 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1501
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001502- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1503 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1504
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001505- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1506 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1507 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1508 case.)
1509
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001510- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1511 passed as unicode strings.
1512
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001513- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1514 See SF bug #683467.
1515
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001516- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1517 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1518
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001519- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1520
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001521- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1522
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001523- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1524 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1525 arguments.
1526
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001527- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1528 See SF bug #667147.
1529
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001530- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001531 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001532 See SF bug #676155.
1533
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001534- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001535 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001536 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1537 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1538 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1539 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1540 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1541 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001542
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001543Extension modules
1544-----------------
1545
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001546- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1547 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1548 tp_as_number pointer.
1549
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001550- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1551 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1552 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1553 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1554 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1555
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001556- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1557
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001558- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1559
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001560- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001561 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001562 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1563 patch #678531.)
1564
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001565- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1566 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1567
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001568- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1569 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1570
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001571- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1572
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001573- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1574 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1575 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1576
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001577- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1578
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001579- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1580 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1581
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001582- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001583
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001584- datetime changes:
1585
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001586 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1587
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001588 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1589 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1590 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1591 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1592 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1593 now.
1594
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001595 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001596 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1597 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001598
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001599 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001600 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001601 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1602 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1603 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1604 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001605
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001606 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1607 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1608 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001609 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1610
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001611 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1612 by a later example coded by Guido.
1613
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001614 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001615 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1616 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1617 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001618 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1619 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1620
1621 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1622 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1623 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1624 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1625 tzinfo subclass instance.
1626
1627 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1628 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1629 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1630 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1631 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1632 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1633 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1634 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001635
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001636 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1637 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1638 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1639 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1640 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001641 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1642
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001643 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001644
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001645 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1646 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1647 as a naive datetime object.
1648
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001649 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1650 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1651 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1652
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001653 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1654 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1655 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1656 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1657 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1658 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1659 comparison.
1660
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001661 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1662 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1663 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1664 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001665 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001666
1667 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001668
1669 and ::
1670
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001671 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1672
1673 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1674 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1675 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1676 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1677
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001678 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1679 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1680 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1681 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1682 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1683
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001684 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1685 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001686 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1687 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001688
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001689Library
1690-------
1691
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001692- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1693 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1694
1695- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1696 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1697 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1698 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1699 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1700 See PEP 307 for details.
1701
1702- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1703 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1704
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001705- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1706 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001707 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001708 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1709 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001710 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001711
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001712- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1713 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1714
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001715- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1716 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1717 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1718
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001719- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1720
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001721- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1722 exception.
1723
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001724- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1725 class.
1726
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001727- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1728 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1729 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1730
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001731- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1732 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1733
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001734- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001735 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1736 See SF bug #659228.
1737
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001738- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1739 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1740 See SF patch #651082.
1741
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001742- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001743
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001744- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1745 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1746
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001747- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001748 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001749
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001750- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1751 DOS paths from other platforms.
1752
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001753Tools/Demos
1754-----------
1755
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001756- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1757 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1758 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1759 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1760 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1761 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1762 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1763 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1764 example:
1765
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001766 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1767 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001768
1769 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1770
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001771
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001772Build
1773-----
1774
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001775- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1776 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1777 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001778 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1779
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001780 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1781
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001782- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1783 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1784 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1785 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1786 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1787 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1788 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1789 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1790 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1791
1792- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1793 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1794 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1795 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1796
1797- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1798 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1799
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001800C API
1801-----
1802
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001803- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1804 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001805
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001806- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1807 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1808 tp_as_number pointer.
1809
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001810- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1811 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1812 (SF #681367)
1813
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001814- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1815 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1816 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1817 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001818
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001819Tests
1820-----
1821
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001822- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001823 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1824 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1825 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1826 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1827 pydoc.)
1828
1829- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1830
1831- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001832
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001833Windows
1834-------
1835
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001836- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1837 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1838 time).
1839
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001840- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1841 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1842
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001843- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1844 release without strong cryptography.
1845
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001846- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001847 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001848
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001849- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1850 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1851
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001852Mac
1853---
1854
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001855- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1856 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001857
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001858- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1859 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1860 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001861
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001862- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1863 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001864
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001865- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1866 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1867 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1868 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001869
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001870- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001871 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1872 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1873 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001874
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001875
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001876What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001877=================================
1878
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001879*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001880
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001881Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001882--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001883
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001884- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1885
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001886- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1887 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001888 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001889 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001890 a different meaning than before.
1891
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001892- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001893 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001894 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001895
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001896- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001897 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001898 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001899
1900- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1901 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1902 and deallocation.
1903
1904- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1905 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1906
1907- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1908 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1909 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1910 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1911 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1912
1913- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1914 now detected by the garbage collector.
1915
1916- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1917 [SF bug 519621]
1918
1919- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1920 identifier.
1921
1922- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1923 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1924 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1925 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1926 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1927 [SF bug 563060]
1928
1929- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1930 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1931 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1932 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1933 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1934
1935- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1936 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1937 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1938
1939- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1940
1941- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1942 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1943 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1944 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1945 state of the slots would be lost.)
1946
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001947Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001948-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001949
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001950- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001951 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1952 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1953 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1954 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001955 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1956 Jython 2.1.
1957
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001958- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001959 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001960 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1961 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1962 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1963 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1964 these, see PEP 302.
1965
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001966- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1967 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1968 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1969
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001970- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1971 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1972 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1973
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001974- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1975 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1976 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1977
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001978- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1979 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1980 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1981 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1982 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1983 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1984 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1985 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1986 releases or implementations.
1987
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001988- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001989 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1990 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001991
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001992- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1993 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1994
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001995- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1996 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1997 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1998
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001999- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2000 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2001
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002002- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2003 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002004 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2005 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002006
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002007- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2008 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2009 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2010 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2011 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2012
2013 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2014 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2015 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2016 pattern.
2017
2018 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2019 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2020 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2021 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2022
2023 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2024 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2025 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2026 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2027 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2028 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2029
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002030- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2031 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2032 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2033 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2034 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2035 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2036 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2037 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002038
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002039- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2040 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2041 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2042 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2043 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002044 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2045 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2046 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2047 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2048 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2049 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2050 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002051
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002052- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2053 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2054
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002055- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2056 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2057 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2058 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2059 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2060 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2061 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2062 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2063 to Zack Weinberg!
2064
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002065- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2066 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2067 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2068 type. This has been fixed now.
2069
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002070- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2071 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2072 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2073
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002074- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2075 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2076 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2077 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2078 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2079 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2080 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2081 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002082 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002083
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002084- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2085 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2086 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002087
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002088- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2089 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2090 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2091 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2092 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2093 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2094 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2095 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002096 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002097 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2098 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2099
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002100- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2101 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2102 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2103 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2104 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2105 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2106 this.)
2107
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002108- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2109 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002110 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002111 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002112 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2113 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002114 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2115 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002116
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002117- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2118 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2119 currently running.
2120
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002121- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2122 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2123 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2124 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2125
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002126- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2127 as directory names.
2128
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002129- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2130 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2131
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002132- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2133 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2134
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002135- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002136 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2137 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002138
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002139- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2140 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2141 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2142 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2143 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2144
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002145- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2146 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2147 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2148 removed.
2149
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002150- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2151 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2152 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2153
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002154- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2155 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2156 to __debug__.
2157
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002158- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2159 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2160 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2161
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002162- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2163 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2164 deprecated now.
2165
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002166- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2167 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2168 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002169
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002170- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2171 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2172 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2173 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2174 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002175
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002176- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2177 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2178
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002179- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2180 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2181 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002182 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002183 is backward compatible.
2184
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002185- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2186 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2187 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2188 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2189 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2190
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002191- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2192 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2193 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2194 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2195 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2196 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002197
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002198- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2199 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2200
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002201- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2202 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2203
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002204- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2205 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2206 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2207 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2208 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2209
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002210- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2211 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2212 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2213
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002214- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002215 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2216
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002217- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2218 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2219 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002220
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002221- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2222 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2223
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002224- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2225 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2226 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2227
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002228- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2229
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002230Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002231-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002232
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002233- Added three operators to the operator module:
2234 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2235 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2236 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2237
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002238- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2239
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002240- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2241 archives.
2242
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002243- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2244 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2245 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2246
2247 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2248
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002249- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2250 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2251 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002252 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002253
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002254- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2255 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2256 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2257 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002258 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2259 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2260 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2261 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002262
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002263- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2264 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002265
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002266- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2267
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002268- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2269 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2270
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002271- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2272 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2273 supported.
2274
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002275- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2276
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002277- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2278 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002279
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002280- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2281 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2282
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002283- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2284
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002285- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2286 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2287
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002288- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2289 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2290 functions but callable type objects.
2291
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002292- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002293 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002294 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002295
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002296- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2297 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002298
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002299- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2300 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002301
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002302- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2303 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2304 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2305 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2306
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002307- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2308 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002309
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002310- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2311 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2312 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2313 and __imul__.
2314
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002315- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002316 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2317 is called.
2318
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002319- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2320 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2321 interpreter was compiled.
2322
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002323- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2324 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2325 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002326 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002327 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2328 1, not 2.
2329
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002330- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2331 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2332 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2333 limit.
2334
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002335- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2336 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2337 bug #623464.
2338
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002339- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2340 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2341 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2342 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2343
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002344Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002345-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002346
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002347- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2348
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002349- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2350 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2351 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2352 with Python 2.3a2.
2353
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002354- os.path exposes getctime.
2355
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002356- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002357 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002358 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002359 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002360 unit tests of floating point results.
2361
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002362- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2363 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2364 has been increased.
2365
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002366- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2367 executed.
2368
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002369- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2370 postinstallation script.
2371
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002372- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2373 test the current module.
2374
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002375- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002376 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2377 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2378 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2379 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2380
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002381- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002382 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002383 Ward's Optik package.
2384
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002385- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2386 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2387 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2388 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2389
2390- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2391 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002392 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002393
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002394- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2395 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2396 shelf are binary pickles.
2397
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002398- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2399 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2400
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002401- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2402 modules are iterators now.
2403
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002404- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2405 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2406 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2407 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2408 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2409 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002410
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002411- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2412 with their entity value.
2413
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002414- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2415
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002416- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2417 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002418
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002419- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2420 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002421 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002422
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002423- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2424 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2425 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2426 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2427 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2428 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2429 main():
2430
2431 import locale
2432 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2433
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002434- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2435 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2436
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002437- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2438 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2439 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2440 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2441 to the new standard.
2442
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002443- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2444 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2445 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2446 an extension to the database.
2447
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002448- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2449 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2450 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2451 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002452 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002453
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002454- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002455 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002456
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002457- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2458 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2459 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2460 bounded integers.
2461
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002462- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2463 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2464 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2465 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2466 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2467 in existence.
2468
2469 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2470 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2471 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2472 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2473 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2474 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2475
2476 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2477 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2478 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2479 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2480
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002481- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2482 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2483 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2484
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002485- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2486
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002487- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2488 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2489 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2490 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2491
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002492- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2493 argument.
2494
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002495- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2496 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2497 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2498 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2499 [SF patch 560794].
2500
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002501- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2502 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2503 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002504 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2505 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2506 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002507
2508- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2509 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002510
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002511- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2512 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2513 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2514 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002515
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002516- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2517 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2518 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2519 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2520 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2521
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002522- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002523
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002524- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2525
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002526- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2527 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2528 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2529 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2530 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2531 identical to None.
2532
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002533- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2534 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2535 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2536 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2537 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2538 results now.
2539
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002540- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2541 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2542
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002543- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2544 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2545 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2546 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2547 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2548 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2549 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2550 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2551
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002552- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2553
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002554- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2555 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2556
2557- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2558 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2559 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2560 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2561 and other systems.
2562
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002563- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2564 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2565 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2566 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 +00002567 work well with these.
2568
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002569- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2570
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002571- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002572 connections.
2573
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002574- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2575 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2576 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2577
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002578- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2579 sets
2580
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002581- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2582 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2583 name.
2584
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002585- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2586 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2587 passed in.
2588
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002589- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002590 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002591 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2592 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002593
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002594- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2595
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002596- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2597
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002598- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2599 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2600 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2601
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002602- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2603 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2604 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2605 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002606 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002607
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002608- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002609 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002610 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002611
2612- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2613 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2614 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2615
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002616- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002617 the value of its expression argument.
2618
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002619- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2620 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2621 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2622
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002623- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2624 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2625 skipstone browser was included.
2626
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002627- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2628 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2629
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002630Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002631-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002632
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002633- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2634 names in addition to accepting file names.
2635
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002636- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2637 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2638 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2639 still used and useful.)
2640
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002641- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2642 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2643 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2644 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002645
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002646- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2647 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2648 the generated binary.
2649
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002650Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002651-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002652
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002653- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2654
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002655- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2656 except in the hands of experts.
2657
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002658- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002659 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2660 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2661 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002662
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002663- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2664 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2665 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2666 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2667 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2668 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2669 builds.
2670
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002671- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2672 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2673 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2674 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2675 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2676 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2677 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2678 new type.
2679
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002680- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002681
2682 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2683 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2684 positive infinities.
2685
2686 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2687 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2688 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2689 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2690 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2691 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2692 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2693
2694 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2695
2696 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2697
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002698- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2699 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2700 size of the executable.
2701
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002702- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2703 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2704 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2705 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002706
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002707- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2708
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002709- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2710 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2711 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002712
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002713- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2714 well as Unix.
2715
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002716- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2717 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2718 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2719 modules in the README file for details.
2720
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002721C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002722-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002723
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002724- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2725 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002726 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002727 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002728 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002729
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002730- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2731 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2732 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2733 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2734 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2735 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002736 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002737 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2738 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2739 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2740 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2741 aligned.)
2742
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002743- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2744 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2745 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2746
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002747- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2748 level.
2749
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002750- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2751 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2752 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2753 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2754 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2755
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002756- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2757 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2758 code.
2759
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002760- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2761 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2762 adjusting for negative indices.
2763
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002764- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2765 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2766 object.
2767
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002768- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2769 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2770 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2771
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002772- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2773 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002774
2775- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2776
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002777- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2778 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2779 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2780 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2781
2782- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2783
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002784- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002785
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002786- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002787 without going through the buffer API.
2788
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002790
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002791- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2792 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2793 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2794 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2795
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002796- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2797 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2798
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002799- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002800 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2801
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002802New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002803-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002804
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002805- OpenVMS is now supported.
2806
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002807- AtheOS is now supported.
2808
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002809- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2810
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002811- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2812
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002813Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002814-----
2815
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002816- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2817 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2818 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002819
2820Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002821-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002822
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002823- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2824 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2825 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2826 bugs.
2827 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002828 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002829 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2830 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002831 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002832
2833- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002834 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002835
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002836- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2837 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2838
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002839- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2840 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002841 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002842 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2843
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002844- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2845 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2846 use files" uninstall option).
2847
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002848- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2849
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002850- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2851 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2852
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002853- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2854 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2855 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2856
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002857- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2858 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2859 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2860 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2861 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002862 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2863 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2864 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002865
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002866- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002867 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002868 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2869 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2870 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2871 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2872 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2873 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2874 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2875 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2876 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2877 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2878 work around.
2879
2880- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2881 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2882 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2883 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2884 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2885 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2886 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2887 specified with O_CREAT too).
2888
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002889Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002890----
2891
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002892- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002893
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002894- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2895 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2896 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2897
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002898- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2899 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2900 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2901
2902- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2903 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2904 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2905 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2906 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2907 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2908 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2909 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002910
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002911- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2912 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2913 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002914
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002915- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2916 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2917 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2918 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2919 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002920
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002921- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2922 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2923 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002924
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002925- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2926 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002927
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002928- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2929 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2930 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2931 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2932 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002933
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002934- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2935 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2936 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2937
2938- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2939 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2940 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002941
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002942- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2943 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2944 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2945 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002946 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002947
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002948- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2949 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002950
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002951- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2952 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002953
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002954- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002955 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002956 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2957 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002958
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002959
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002960What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002961===============================
2962
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002963*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2964
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002965Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002966--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002967
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002968- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2969 with a custom metaclass.
2970
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002971Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002972-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002973
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002974- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2975 are proxies.
2976
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002977Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002978-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002979
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002980- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2981 very short strings.
2982
2983- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2984 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2985 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2986 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2987 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2988
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002989Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002991
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002992- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2993 close or delete time).
2994
2995- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2996 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2997
2998- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2999
3000- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003001 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003002
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003003Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003004-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003005
3006Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003007-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003008
3009C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003011
3012New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003013-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003014
3015Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003016-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003017
3018Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003019-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003020
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003021- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3022
3023- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3024 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3025
3026- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3027 deleted at process exit time.
3028
3029- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3030 in backslash.
3031
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003032Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003033----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003034
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003035- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3036 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3037 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3038
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003039
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003040What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003041===========================
3042
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003043*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3044
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003045Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003046--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003047
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003048- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3049 been extensively updated. See
3050
3051 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3052
3053 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3054
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003055- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3056 deleted!
3057
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003058- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3059 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3060 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3061 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3062 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3063
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003064- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3065
3066 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3067 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3068
3069 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3070 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3071 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3072 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3073 supported anyway.
3074
3075 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3076 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3077
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003078- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3079 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3080 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3081 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3082 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003083
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003084- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3085 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3086 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3087
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003088Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003089-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003090
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003091- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3092 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3093 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3094 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3095 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3096 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003097 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3098 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3099 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3100 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003101
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003102- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3103 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3104 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3105
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003106Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003107-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003108
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003109- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3110
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003111Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003112-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003113
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003114- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3115 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3116 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3117 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3118 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3119 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3120
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003121- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3122
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003123- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3124
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003125- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3126
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003127- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3128 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3129 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3130
3131- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3132
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003133Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003134-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003135
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003136- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3137 off a search on Google.
3138
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003139Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003141
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003142- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3143 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3144 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3145 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3146 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3147 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3148 other platforms should do likewise.
3149
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003150- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3151 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3152 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3153
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003154C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003155-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003156
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003157- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3158 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3159 producing key-value pairs.
3160
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003161- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003162 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003163 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3164 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3165 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3166 previously went unchallenged.
3167
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003168New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003169-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003170
3171Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003172-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003173
3174Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003175-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003176
3177Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003178----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003179
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003180- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3181 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003182
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003183- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3184 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3185 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3186 home.
3187
3188
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003189What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003190===========================
3191
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003192*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3193
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003194Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003195--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003196
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003197- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3198 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003199
3200 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003201 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003202
3203 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3204 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003205 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003206 This needs to be documented.
3207
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003208- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3209 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3210
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003211- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3212 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3213 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3214
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003215- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3216 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3217
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003218- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3219 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3220 class forbids it).
3221
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003222- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3223 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3224 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3225
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003226- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3227
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003228Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003230
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003231- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3232 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003233 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003234
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003235- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3236 (like 1 + '').
3237
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003238Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003240
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003241- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3242 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3243 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3244 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003245 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003246 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3247
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003248- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3249 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3250 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3251 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3252
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003253- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3254 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003255 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3256 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3257 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003258
3259- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3260 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003261
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003262- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3263 bytes on its input.
3264
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003265Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003266-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003267
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003268- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003269 convenience function.
3270
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003271- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3272 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3273 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003274 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3275 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3276 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3277 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3278 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3279 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003280
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003281- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3282 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3283 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3284 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3285
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003286- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3287 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3288 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3289
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003290- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3291 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3292 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3293 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3294
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003295- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3296 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003297 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003298 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3299 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3300 new -l and -e options.
3301
3302- statcache is now deprecated.
3303
3304- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3305 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003306 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003307 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3308 time properly taken into account.
3309
3310- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3311 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3312 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3313 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3314
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003315Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003316-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003317
3318Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003320
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003321- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3322 is built with libdb3 if available.
3323
3324- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3325
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003326C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003327-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003328
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003329- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3330 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3331 PySequence_Size().
3332
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003333- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3334
3335- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3336 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3337 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3338
3339- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3340 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3341
3342- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3343 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3344
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003345New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003347
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003348- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3349 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3350
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003351- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3352 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3353
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003354- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3355
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003356Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003358
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003359- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3360 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3361
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003362Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003363-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003364
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003365Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003366----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003367
3368- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3369 removed completely in the next release.
3370
3371- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3372 OSX.
3373
3374- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3375 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3376
3377- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3378
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003379
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003380What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003381===========================
3382
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3384
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003385Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003386--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003387
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003388- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003389 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003390 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003391 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3392 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003393 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3394 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003395 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3396 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003397
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003398- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3399 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3400
3401- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3402 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3403
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003404Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003405-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003406
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003407- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3408 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3409 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3410 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3411 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3412 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3413 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3414 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3415
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003416- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3417 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3418 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3419 example).
3420
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003421- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003422 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003423 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003424 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003425
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003426- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3427 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3428 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003429 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003430
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003431- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3432 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3433 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3434 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3435 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3436 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3437
3438 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3439
3440 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3441
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003442Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003444
3445- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3446
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003447- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3448
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003449- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3450 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003451
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003452- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3453 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3454 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3455 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3456 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3457 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003458 attributes.
3459
3460- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3461 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3462 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003463
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003464- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3465 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3466 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003467
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003468- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3469 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3470 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003471 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3472 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3473
3474- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3475 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003476
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003477Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003478-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003479
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003480- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3481 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3482
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003483- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3484 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3485 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3486 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3487
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003488- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3489 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3490 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3491 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3492
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003493 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3494 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3495 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3496 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3497 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3498 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3499 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3500 without losing information).
3501
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003502- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003503 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3504 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3505 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3506 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3507 module).
3508
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003509 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003510 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3511 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3512 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3513 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003514
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003515- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003516 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3517 encoding.
3518
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003519- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3520 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3521
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003522- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003523 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3524
3525- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3526 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3527 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3528 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3529
3530- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3531
3532- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3533 ON, and OFF.
3534
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003535- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3536 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3537
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003538Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003540
3541- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3542 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3543 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003544
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003545- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3546 been added: -X and -E.
3547
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003548Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003549-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003550
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003551- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3552 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3553
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003554C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003556
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003557- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3558 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3559 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3560 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3561 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3562
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003563- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3564 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3565 as long) arguments.
3566
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003567- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3568 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3569 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3570 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3571 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3572 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3573
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003574- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3575 input.
3576
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003577New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003579
3580Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003582
3583Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003584-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003585
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003586- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3587 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3588 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3589
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003590- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3591 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3592 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003593 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003594
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003595 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3596 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3597 import signal
3598 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003599
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003600 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003601 while 1:
3602 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003603 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003604 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3605 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3606 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3607 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003608
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003609
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003610What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3611===========================
3612
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3614
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003615Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003617
3618- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3619 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3620 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3621
3622- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3623 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3624 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3625 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3626 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3627 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3628 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003629
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003630- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003631 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003632 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3633 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3634 associate a docstring with a property.
3635
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003636- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3637 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3638 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3639 other built-in object types.
3640
3641- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3642 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3643 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3644 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3645 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3646
3647- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3648 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3649
3650- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3651 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003652 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003653 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3654 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3655 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3656 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3657 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3658
3659- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3660 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3661 class.
3662
3663- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3664 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3665 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3666 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3667
3668- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3669 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3670 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3671 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3672
3673- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3674 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3675
3676- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3677 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3678 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3679 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3680 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003681 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003682 with the same value as s.
3683
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003684- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3685
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003686Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003687----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003688
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003689- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3690
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003691- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3692 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3693 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3694 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3695 objects.
3696
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003697- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3698 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003699 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3700 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3701
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003702- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3703 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3704 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3705
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003706Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003708
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003709- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3710 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3711 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3712 by the instances.
3713
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003714- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3715 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3716 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3717
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003718- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3719 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3720 before the entire comparison is complete.
3721
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003722- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3723 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3724 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3725
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003726- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3727 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3728 getwriter().
3729
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003730- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3731 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3732
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003733- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003734 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3735 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3736
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003737- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3738 iterable object.
3739
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003740- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3741 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003742
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003743- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3744 authentication.
3745
3746- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3747 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003748
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003749- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003750 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3751 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3752 a sample driver.)
3753
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003754Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003756
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003757- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3758 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3759 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3760 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3761 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3762 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3763 kernel has large file support.
3764
3765- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3766 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3767 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3768 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3769 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3770
3771- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3772 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3773 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3774
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003775C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003776-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003777
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003778- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3779 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3780
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003781New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003783
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003784- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3785 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3786
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003787Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003789
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003790- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3791 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3792 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3793 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3794 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3795
3796- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3797 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3798 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3799 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3800
3801- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3802 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3803
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003804Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003806
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003807- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003808 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3809 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003810
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003811
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003812What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3813===========================
3814
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3816
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003817Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003819
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003820- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3821 big to represent as a C double.
3822
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003823- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3824 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3825 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3826 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3827 restriction).
3828
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003829- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3830 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3831 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3832 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3833 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3834
3835 >>> dir([])
3836 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3837 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3838 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3839 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3840 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3841 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3842 'reverse', 'sort']
3843
3844 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3845
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003846- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003847 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3848 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3849 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3850 OverflowError exception.
3851
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003852- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003853 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003854 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3855 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3856 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3857 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3858 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003859 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003860 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3861 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3862
3863 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3864 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3865 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3866 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003867
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003868- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003869 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3870 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3871 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3872 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3873 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3874 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3875 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3876 once it is created.
3877
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003878- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3879 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3880 (key, value) pairs.
3881
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003882- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003883 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3884 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3885
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003886- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3887 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3888 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3889 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3890 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003891
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003892- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003893 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3894 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3895
3896 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3897
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003898- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003899 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3900
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003901Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003902-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003903
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003904- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003905 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3906 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003907
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003908- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3909 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3910 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3911 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3912 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3913 in this area anymore).
3914
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003915- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3916 threading.Timer.
3917
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003918- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3919 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3920
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003921- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003922 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3923
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003924- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003925 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3926 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3927 converted to Python longs.
3928
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003929- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003930 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3931
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003932- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3933 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3934 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3935
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003936Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003938
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003939- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3940 division operators as per PEP 238.
3941
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003942Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003943-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003944
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003945- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3946 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3947 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3948 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3949
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003950C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003952
3953- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003954
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003955- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3956 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003957 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003958
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3960 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003961 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003962 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003963
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003964- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003965 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3966 module:
3967
3968 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003969
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003970 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3971 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003972
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003973 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3974 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003975
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003976 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3977
3978 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3979
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003980- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003981 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3982 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3983 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003984
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003985New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003987
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003988- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3989 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3990 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3991 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3992 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003993
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003994Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003996
3997Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003999
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004000- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4001 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4002 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4003 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004004 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4005 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4006 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4007 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4008 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004009
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004010- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004011 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4012
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004013
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004014What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4015===========================
4016
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4018
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004019Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004021
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004022- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4023 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4024
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004025- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4026 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4027 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004028
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004029- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4030 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4031 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4032 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004033
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004034- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4035
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004036- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004037
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004038Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004039-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004040
4041- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004042 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004043 the module docstring for details.
4044
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004045Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004047
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004048- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004049 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4050 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4051 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004052
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004053- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4054 Nick Mathewson.
4055
4056Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004057----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004058
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004059- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4060 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4061 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4062 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4063 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4064 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4065 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4066 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4067
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004068- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4069 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4070 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4071 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4072
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004073- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4074 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4075 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4076 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4077 come a long way).
4078
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004079- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4080 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4081 write filters for these warnings).
4082
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004083- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4084 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4085 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4086 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4087 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4088
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004089- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4090 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4091 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4092 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4093 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4094 older distribution.
4095
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004096Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004098
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004099- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4100 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004101 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004102
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004103- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4104 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4105 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4106
4107- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4108
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004109- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4110
4111- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4112
4113- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4114
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004115- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004116
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004117- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4118
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004119New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004121
4122C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004124
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004125- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4126 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4127 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4128 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4129 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4130 against buffer overruns.
4131
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004132- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004133 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4134 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004135 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4136 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4137 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4138
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004139- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4140 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4141 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4142 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4143 deprecated.
4144
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004145Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004147
4148- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4149 relevant is found.
4150
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004151
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004152What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004153===========================
4154
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4156
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004157Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004159
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004160- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4161 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4162 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4163 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4164 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4165 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4166 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4167 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004168 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004169 repaired.
4170
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004171- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004172 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004173 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4174 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4175 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4176 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4177 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4178 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4179 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4180 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4181
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004182- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4183 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4184 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4185 leading BMO character).
4186
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004187- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4188 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4189 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4190
4191 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4192 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4193 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004194
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004195 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4196 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4197 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4198 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4199 for various simple to use conversions.
4200
4201 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4202 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4203
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4205 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4206 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4207 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4208 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4209 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4210 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4211 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4212 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4213 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4214 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4215 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4216 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4217 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4218 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004219
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004220- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4221 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4222 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004223 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004224 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004225
4226 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004227 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4228 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4229 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4230 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4231 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004232 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4233 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004234
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004235 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4236 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4237 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004238 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004239
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004240- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4241 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4242 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4243 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4244 floating arithmetic,
4245
4246 x = 9007199254740992.0
4247 print long(x)
4248
4249 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4250 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4251 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4252 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4253 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4254 functions are of good quality).
4255
4256 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4257 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4258 algorithms to break.
4259
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004260- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4261 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4262 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4263 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4264 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4265 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4266 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4267 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4268 order.
4269
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004270- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4271 operation along the most common code paths.
4272
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004273- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4274 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4275
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004276- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4277 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4278 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4279 {}.update(UserDict())
4280
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004281- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4282 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4283 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4284 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4285 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4286 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4287 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4288 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4289
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004290- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004291 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004293 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004294 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4295 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004296 join() method of strings
4297 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004298 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4299 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004301 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004302
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004303- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4304 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4305
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004306- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4307 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4308
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004309- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4310 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4311 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4312 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4313
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004314- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4315 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004316 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004317 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4318 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004319
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004320- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4321
4322
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004323Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004325
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004326- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004327 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004328 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4329 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4330
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004331- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4332 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4333
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004334- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4335 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4336 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4337 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4338
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004339- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4340 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4341 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4342
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004343- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4344
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004345- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4346
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004347- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4348 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4349 that are still imported into string.py).
4350
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004351- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4352
4353- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4354 Now it does.
4355
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004356- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4357
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004358- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4359 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4360 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4361 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4362 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004363 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4364 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004365
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004366- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4367 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4368 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4369 'help(object)'.
4370
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004371Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004372-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004373
4374- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004375 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004376 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4377 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4378
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004379- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004380 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4381 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004382
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004383C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004385
4386- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4387 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388
4389----
4390
4391**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**