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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000015- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
16 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
17
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000018- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000020
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000021- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 which was missing for no apparent reason.
24
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000025- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000026 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
27 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
28
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000029- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
30 types that support garbage collection.
31
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000032- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
33
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000034- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
35 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
36 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
37 Jython.
38
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000039- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
40
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000041Extension modules
42-----------------
43
44Library
45-------
46
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +000047- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
48 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
49
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000050- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
51 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
52 when dummy_threading is being used.
53
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000054- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
55 from a tarfile.
56
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000057- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +000058 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000059
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000060- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
61 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
62 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
63 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
64
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000065- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
66 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
67
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000068- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
69 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
70 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
71 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
72 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
73 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
74 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
75 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
76 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
77 by some other method in progress).
78
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000079- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
80 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
81 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000082
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000083- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
84
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000085- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
86 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
87 AM Kuchling.
88
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000089- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
90 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
91 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
92
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000093- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
94 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
95 instead of unsigned.
96
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000097- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000098 no longer part of the public API.
99
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000100- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
101 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
102 string methods of the same name).
103
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000104- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
105 SF patch 982681.
106
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000107- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000108 SF patch 945642.
109
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000110- doctest unittest integration improvements:
111
112 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
113
114 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
115 DocTestSuites.
116
117- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
118 that provide thread-local data.
119
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000120- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
121 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
122
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000123- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
124
125- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
126 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
127 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
128
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000129
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000130Tools/Demos
131-----------
132
133Build
134-----
135
136C API
137-----
138
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000139- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
140 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
141
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000142Documentation
143-------------
144
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000145- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000146
147 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
148 assigning thier values
149
150 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
151
152 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
153
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000154- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000155
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000156New platforms
157-------------
158
159Tests
160-----
161
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000162- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000163 platforms that use the Makefile.
164
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000165- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
166 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
167 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
168
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000169Windows
170-------
171
172Mac
173---
174
175
176
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000177What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
178=================================
179
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000180*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000181
182Core and builtins
183-----------------
184
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000185- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
186 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
187 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
188 objects now (one object instead of three).
189
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000190- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
191 Windows DLLs.
192
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000193- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
194
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000195- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
196 a new .pyc magic.
197
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000198- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
199 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
200 be there.
201
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000202- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
203 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
204 the LC_NUMERIC category.
205
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000206- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
207 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
208 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
209
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000210- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
211
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000212- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
213 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
214 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000215
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000216- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
217 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
218
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000219- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
220
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000221- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000222 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000223
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000224- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
225
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000226- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
227
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000228- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
229 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
230
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000231- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
232 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
233 Fixes bug #858016 .
234
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000235- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
236 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
237 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
238
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000239- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
240 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
241 improves their performance (about 35%).
242
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000243- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
244 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
245 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
246
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000247- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
248 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
249 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
250 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
251
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000252- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
253 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
254 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
255 length is not known).
256
257- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
258 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000259 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
260 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000261 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
262
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000263- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
264 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
265
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000266- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
267 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
268 keyword arguments.
269
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000270- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
271 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
272 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
273
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000274- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
275 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
276 cases.
277
278- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
279 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
280 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
281 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
282 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
283 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
284 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
285 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
286 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
287 a release build.
288
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000289- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
290 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
291
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000292- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000293 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000294
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000295- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
296 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
297 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
298 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
299 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
300 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
301 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
302 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
303 destroyed.
304
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000305- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
306 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
307 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
308 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
309 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
310 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
311 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
312 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
313
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000314- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
315 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
316 character other than a space.
317
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000318- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
319 by the function object or by the method object, the function
320 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
321 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
322 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
323 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
324 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
325 attributes with the same name.
326
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000327- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
328 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
329 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
330 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
331 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
332 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
333 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
334 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
335 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
336 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
337 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
338 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
339 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
340 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000341
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000342- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
343 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
344 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
345 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
346 This has been repaired.
347
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000348- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
349
350- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
351
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000352- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
353 over a sequence.
354
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000355- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000356 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000357
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000358- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
359
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000360- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
361 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
362 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
363 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
364 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
365 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
366 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
367 records with equal keys is unchanged).
368
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000369- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
370 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
371 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
372
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000373- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
374 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
375 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
376 freelist.
377
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000378- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
379 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
380
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000381- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
382 number.
383
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000384- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
385 a TypeError exception.
386
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000387- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
388 820195.
389
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000390- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
391 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
392 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
393
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000394- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000395 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
396 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000397
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000398- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
399 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
400 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
401
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000402- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
403 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000404 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000405
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000406- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000407 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
408 the first call.
409
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000410
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000411Extension modules
412-----------------
413
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000414- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
415 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
416
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000417- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
418 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
419 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
420 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
421 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
422 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
423 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000424
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000425- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
426
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000427- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
428
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000429- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
430 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
431
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000432- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
433 fewer false positives.
434
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000435- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
436 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
437
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000438- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000439 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
440
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000441- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000442 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000443 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
444 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
445 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000446
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000447- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
448 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
449 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
450 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
451
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000452- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
453 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
454 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
455 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
456 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
457 #897625.
458
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000459- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
460 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
461
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000462- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
463 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
464 and pops on either side of the deque.
465
466- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
467 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
468
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000469- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
470 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
471 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
472 other functions that expect a function argument.
473
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000474- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
475
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000476- os.getsid was added.
477
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000478- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
479 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
480 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
481
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000482- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
483
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000484- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
485
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000486- readline.clear_history was added.
487
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000488- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
489
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000490- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
491
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000492- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
493
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000494- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
495
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000496- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
497
498- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
499
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000500- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
501
502- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
503
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000504- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
505 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
506 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
507
508- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
509 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
510 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
511 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
512 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
513 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
514 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
515
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000516- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
517 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
518 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
519 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000520
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000521- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000522 iterators from a single iterable.
523
524- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
525 of raising a TypeError exception.
526
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000527- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
528 as parameter.
529
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000530Library
531-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000532
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000533- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
534 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
535 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000536
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000537- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
538 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
539 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000540
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000541- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000542
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000543- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
544 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000545
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000546- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
547 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
548
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000549- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
550
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000551- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000552 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000553
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000554- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
555 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
556
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000557- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
558
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000559- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
560 on cygwin and mingw32.
561
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000562- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
563
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000564- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
565 module.
566
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000567- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
568 installation scheme for all platforms.
569
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000570- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000571 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000572
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000573- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
574 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
575 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
576
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000577- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
578 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
579 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
580
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000581- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
582
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000583- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
584
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000585- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
586 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
587
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000588- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
589 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
590 type pattern with the same value exists.
591
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000592- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
593 when run from the command prompt).
594
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000595- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
596 not taken into consideration when caching value.
597
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000598- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
599 default sort).
600
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000601- Added global runctx function to profile module
602
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000603- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
604
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000605- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
606
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000607- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
608
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000609- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000610 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
611 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
612 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
613 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
614 accordingly.
615
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000616- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
617 decoding standards.
618
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000619- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
620 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
621 called for all requests.
622
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000623- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
624 they are passed to the compiler.
625
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000626- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
627 indent, width and depth.
628
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000629- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
630 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
631
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000632- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
633 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
634
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000635- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
636
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000637- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
638
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000639- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
640
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000641- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
642 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
643
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000644- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000645 for better performance.
646
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000647- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000648
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000649- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
650 a string).
651
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000652- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
653
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000654- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
655
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000656- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
657
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000658- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
659
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000660- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
661 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
662 list of fieldnames.
663
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000664- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
665 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
666
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000667- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
668
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000669- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
670 empty lists.
671
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000672- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
673 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
674 and shelves.
675
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000676- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
677 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
678
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000679- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000680 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
681 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000682
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000683- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
684 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000685 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000686
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000687- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000688 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
689 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
690
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000691- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
692 and removed in Py2.4.
693
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000694- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
695
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000696- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
697
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000698Tools/Demos
699-----------
700
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000701- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
702 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
703
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000704- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
705
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000706- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
707 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
708 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
709 destination in situations where both files are given.
710
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000711- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
712 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
713 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
714 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
715
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000716- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
717
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000718- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
719 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
720 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
721 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
722 now.
723
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000724- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
725 in effect
726
727- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
728 C-c C-h
729
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000730- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
731 -d option was given.
732
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000733Build
734-----
735
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000736- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
737 build under OS X.
738
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000739- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
740 --enable-profiling.
741
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000742- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
743 is configured --with-tsc.
744
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000745- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
746 on AMD64.
747
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000748- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
749 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
750
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000751- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
752 removed.
753
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000754- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
755 supported (see PEP 11).
756
757- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
758
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000759- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
760
761- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
762 (see PEP 11).
763
764- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
765 sizeof(char) must be 1.
766
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000767C API
768-----
769
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000770- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
771 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
772 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
773
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000774- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
775 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
776 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
777 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
778
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000779- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
780 generator objects.
781
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000782- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
783 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000784 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
785 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000786
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000787- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
788 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
789
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000790- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
791 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
792 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
793 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
794 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
795
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000796- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
797 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
798 about 10% faster.
799
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000800- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
801 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
802
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000803- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
804 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
805 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
806 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
807
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000808Windows
809-------
810
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000811- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
812 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
813 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
814 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
815
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000816- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
817 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
818 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
819
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000820
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000821What's New in Python 2.3 final?
822===============================
823
824*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
825
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000826IDLE
827----
828
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000829- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
830 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
831 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
832 context-menu actions.
833
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000834- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
835 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
836 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
837 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
838 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
839 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
840 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
841 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
842 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
843
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000844
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000845What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
846=============================================
847
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000848*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000849
850Core and builtins
851-----------------
852
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000853- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000854 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000855 comment at the end are still unsupported.
856
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000857Extension modules
858-----------------
859
860- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
861 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
862 than once. This has been fixed.
863
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000864- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
865 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
866 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
867 call.
868
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000869- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
870
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000871Library
872-------
873
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000874- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
875 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
876
877- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
878 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
879 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
880 restored.
881
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000882IDLE
883----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000884
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000885- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000886
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000887Build
888-----
889
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000890- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
891 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
892
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000893C API
894-----
895
896Windows
897-------
898
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000899- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
900 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
901
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000902- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
903
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000904Mac
905---
906
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000907- Various fixes to pimp.
908
909- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
910
911- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
912 more problems than it solves.
913
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000914
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000915What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
916=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000917
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000918*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
919
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000920Core and builtins
921-----------------
922
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000923- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
924 by sys.setcheckinterval().
925
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000926- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
927 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000928 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000929
930- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
931 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
932 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000933 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000934
935- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
936 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000937
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000938- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
939 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
940 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
941
942- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000943 770247.
944
945- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000946
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000947Extension modules
948-----------------
949
950- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
951 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
952
953- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
954
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000955- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
956
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000957- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
958 contained within the _strptime module.
959
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000960- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
961 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
962
963- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000964 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
965
966- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
967 the find_class attribute, if present.
968
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000969- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000970
971 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
972 (SF bug 763298).
973
974 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000975 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
976 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
977 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000978
979 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
980
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000981Library
982-------
983
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000984- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
985
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000986- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
987 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
988 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
989 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
990 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
991 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
992 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
993 or Tester().
994
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000995- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
996 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
997 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
998 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
999 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1000 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1001 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1002 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1003 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001004
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001005 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001006
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001007- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1008 weren't before was an oversight.
1009
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001010- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1011 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1012
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001013- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1014 when there are no lines.
1015
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001016- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1017 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1018
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001019- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1020 to child processes.
1021
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001022- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1023
1024- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1025
1026- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1027 xmlrpclib.
1028
1029- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1030 responses.
1031
1032- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1033 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1034
1035- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1036 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1037 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1038
1039- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1040 used as patterns.
1041
1042- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1043 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1044 than Tk 8.3.
1045
1046- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1047
1048- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001049
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001050Tools/Demos
1051-----------
1052
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001053- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1054
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001055- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1056
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001057- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001058
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001059Build
1060-----
1061
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001062- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1063
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001064- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1065
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001066- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1067 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001068
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001069- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1070 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1071 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001072
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001073C API
1074-----
1075
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001076- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1077 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1078
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001079Windows
1080-------
1081
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001082- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1083 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1084 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1085 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1086 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1087 Python exception ::
1088
1089 thread.error: can't start new thread
1090
1091 is raised now.
1092
1093- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1094 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1095 instead of from DLL teardown.
1096
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001097Mac
1098---
1099
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001100- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001101 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001102 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1103 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1104 the executable in the bundle.
1105
1106- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001107
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001108- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1109
1110- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1111 on Panther.
1112
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001113What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1114================================
1115
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001116*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001117
1118Core and builtins
1119-----------------
1120
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001121- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1122 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1123 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1124 with the -i option.
1125
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001126- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1127 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1128
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001129- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1130 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1131
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001132- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1133 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1134 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1135 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1136 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1137 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1138 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1139 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1140 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1141 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1142 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1143 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1144 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001145
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001146- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1147 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1148 embedded in a lambda expression.
1149
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001150- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1151 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1152 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1153 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1154 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1155
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001156- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1157 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1158 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1159
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001160- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1161 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1162
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001163- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1164 It's writable again.
1165
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001166- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1167 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1168 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001169 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001170
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001171- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1172 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1173 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1174
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001175Extension modules
1176-----------------
1177
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001178- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1179 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1180
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001181- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1182 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1183 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1184 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1185
1186- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1187 collection.
1188
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001189- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1190 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1191 unique within a single program run.
1192
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001193- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1194 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1195
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001196- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1197 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1198
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001199- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1200 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001201
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001202- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1203
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001204- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1205 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1206
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001207- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1208 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1209 for many BSD-derived systems.
1210
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001211
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001212Library
1213-------
1214
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001215- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1216 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1217 primary ones:
1218
1219 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1220 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1221 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1222
1223 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1224 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1225 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1226 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1227 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1228 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1229
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001230- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1231 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1232 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1233 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1234 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1235 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1236 argument.
1237
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001238- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1239 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1240 in the archive.
1241
1242- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1243 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1244
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001245- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1246 569574).
1247
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001248- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1249 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1250 no more.
1251
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001252- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1253 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1254 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1255 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1256 code coverage.
1257
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001258- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1259 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1260 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001261 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1262 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001263
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001264- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1265 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1266 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001267 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001268
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001269- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1270
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001271- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1272 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1273 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1274 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1275
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001276- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1277 handling.
1278
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001279- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1280 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1281
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001282- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1283 in socket.py.
1284
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001285- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1286
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001287- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1288 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1289 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1290 opener with proxy support.
1291
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001292- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1293
1294- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1295
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001296Tools/Demos
1297-----------
1298
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001299- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1300
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001301- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1302
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001303- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1304 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001305
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001306- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1307 files.
1308
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001309Build
1310-----
1311
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001312- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001313 different root directory.
1314
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001315C API
1316-----
1317
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001318- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1319 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1320 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1321 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1322 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1323 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1324 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1325 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1326 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1327 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1328
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001329- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1330 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1331 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1332 from Python.
1333
1334
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001335New platforms
1336-------------
1337
1338None this time.
1339
1340Tests
1341-----
1342
1343- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1344 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1345
1346Windows
1347-------
1348
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001349- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1350
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001351- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1352 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1353 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1354 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1355 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1356 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1357 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1358 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1359 that's what it's for.
1360
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001361Mac
1362---
1363
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001364- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1365 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1366 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1367 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001368- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1369 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1370- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001371
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001372SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1373------------------------------------
1374
1375430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1376598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1377622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1378661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1379683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1380697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1381713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1382724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1383727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1384729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1385730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1386731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1387732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1388733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1389735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1390740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1391744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1392745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1393747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1394749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1395751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1396753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1397755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1398757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1399760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1400
1401
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001402What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1403================================
1404
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001405*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001406
1407Core and builtins
1408-----------------
1409
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001410- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1411 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1412
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001413- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1414 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1415 and cannot be strings).
1416
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001417- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1418 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1419 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1420 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1421
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001422- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1423 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1424 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1425 Python itself.
1426
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001427- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1428 the referenced object, if it has one.
1429
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001430- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1431 the thread started at
1432 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1433
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001434- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1435 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1436 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1437 placed on a list index.
1438
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001439- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1440 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1441 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1442 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1443
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001444- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1445 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1446 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1447 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1448 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1449 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1450 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1451
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001452- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1453 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1454 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1455 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1456 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1457
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001458- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1459 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001460
1461- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1462 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1463 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1464 #693195.)
1465
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001466- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1467 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001468
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001469- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001470 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001471 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1472 interpreter executions, would fail.
1473
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001474- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001475 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001476 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001477
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001478Extension modules
1479-----------------
1480
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001481- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1482 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1483 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1484 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1485
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001486- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1487 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1488
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001489- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1490 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1491 and Greg Chapman.)
1492
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001493- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1494 recursively.
1495
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001496- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001497 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1498 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1499 leaks.
1500
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001501- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1502
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001503- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1504 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1505 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1506 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1507 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1508 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1509 #705836.
1510
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001511- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001512 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1513
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001514- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1515 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1516 See SF bug #692416.
1517
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001518- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1519 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1520
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001521- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1522 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1523 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001524
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001525- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001526 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1527 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1528
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001529- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1530 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1531 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1532 timeouts to work properly.
1533
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001534Library
1535-------
1536
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001537- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1538 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1539 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1540 future release.
1541
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001542- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1543 for querying platform dependent features.
1544
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001545- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001546
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001547- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1548 pickle protocol versions.
1549
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001550- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1551 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1552 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1553
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001554- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1555
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001556- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1557 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1558 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1559 modules.
1560
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001561- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1562 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1563 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1564
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001565- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1566 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1567
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001568- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1569 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1570 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1571
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001572- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001573 MS Office extensions.
1574
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001575- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1576 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1577
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001578- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1579 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1580
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001581- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1582 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1583 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1584 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1585 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1586 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1587
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001588- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1589 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1590 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001591
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001592- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1593 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1594 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1595
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001596- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1597
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001598- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1599 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1600 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1601
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001602Tools/Demos
1603-----------
1604
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001605- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1606 See the module docstring for details.
1607
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001608Build
1609-----
1610
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001611- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1612 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001613
1614C API
1615-----
1616
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001617- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1618
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001619- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1620 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1621 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1622
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001623- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1624 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001625
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001626 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1627 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1628 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001629
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001630- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001631 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1632
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001633- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1634 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1635 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001636
1637New platforms
1638-------------
1639
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001640None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001641
1642Tests
1643-----
1644
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001645- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1646 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001647
1648Windows
1649-------
1650
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001651- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1652 function.
1653
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001654- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1655 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001656
1657Mac
1658---
1659
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001660- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1661 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001662
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001663- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1664 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001665
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001666- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1667 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1668 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001669
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001670- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001671 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1672 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001673
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001674- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1675 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001676
1677
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001678What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1679=================================
1680
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001681*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001682
1683Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001684-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001685
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001686- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1687 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1688 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1689
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001690- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1691 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1692 (SF patch #664376.)
1693
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001694- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1695 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1696 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1697 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1698 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1699 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001700 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001701
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001702- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1703 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1704 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1705 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001706 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001707
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001708- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1709 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1710 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1711 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1712 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1713 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1714 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1715 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1716 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1717 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1718 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1719
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001720- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1721 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1722 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1723 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1724 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1725 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1726
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001727- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1728 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1729
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001730- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1731 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1732 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1733 case.)
1734
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001735- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1736 passed as unicode strings.
1737
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001738- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1739 See SF bug #683467.
1740
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001741- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1742 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1743
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001744- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1745
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001746- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1747
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001748- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1749 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1750 arguments.
1751
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001752- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1753 See SF bug #667147.
1754
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001755- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001756 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001757 See SF bug #676155.
1758
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001759- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001760 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001761 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1762 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1763 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1764 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1765 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1766 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001767
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001768Extension modules
1769-----------------
1770
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001771- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1772 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1773 tp_as_number pointer.
1774
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001775- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1776 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1777 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1778 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1779 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1780
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001781- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1782
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001783- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1784
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001785- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001786 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001787 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1788 patch #678531.)
1789
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001790- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1791 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1792
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001793- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1794 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1795
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001796- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1797
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001798- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1799 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1800 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1801
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001802- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1803
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001804- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1805 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1806
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001807- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001808
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001809- datetime changes:
1810
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001811 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1812
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001813 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1814 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1815 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1816 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1817 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1818 now.
1819
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001820 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001821 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1822 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001823
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001824 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001825 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001826 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1827 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1828 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1829 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001830
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001831 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1832 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1833 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001834 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1835
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001836 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1837 by a later example coded by Guido.
1838
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001839 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001840 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1841 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1842 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001843 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1844 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1845
1846 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1847 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1848 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1849 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1850 tzinfo subclass instance.
1851
1852 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1853 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1854 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1855 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1856 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1857 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1858 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1859 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001860
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001861 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1862 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1863 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1864 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1865 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001866 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1867
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001868 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001869
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001870 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1871 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1872 as a naive datetime object.
1873
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001874 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1875 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1876 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1877
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001878 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1879 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1880 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1881 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1882 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1883 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1884 comparison.
1885
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001886 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1887 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1888 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1889 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001890 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001891
1892 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001893
1894 and ::
1895
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001896 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1897
1898 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1899 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1900 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1901 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1902
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001903 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1904 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1905 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1906 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1907 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1908
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001909 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1910 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001911 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1912 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001913
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001914Library
1915-------
1916
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001917- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1918 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1919
1920- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1921 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1922 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1923 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1924 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1925 See PEP 307 for details.
1926
1927- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1928 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1929
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001930- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1931 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001932 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001933 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1934 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001935 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001936
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001937- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1938 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1939
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001940- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1941 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1942 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1943
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001944- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1945
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001946- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1947 exception.
1948
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001949- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1950 class.
1951
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001952- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1953 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1954 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1955
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001956- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1957 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1958
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001959- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001960 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1961 See SF bug #659228.
1962
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001963- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1964 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1965 See SF patch #651082.
1966
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001967- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001968
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001969- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1970 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1971
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001972- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001973 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001974
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001975- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1976 DOS paths from other platforms.
1977
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001978Tools/Demos
1979-----------
1980
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001981- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1982 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1983 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1984 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1985 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1986 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1987 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1988 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1989 example:
1990
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001991 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1992 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001993
1994 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1995
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001996
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001997Build
1998-----
1999
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002000- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2001 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2002 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002003 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2004
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002005 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2006
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002007- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2008 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2009 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2010 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2011 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2012 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2013 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2014 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2015 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2016
2017- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2018 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2019 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2020 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2021
2022- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2023 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2024
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002025C API
2026-----
2027
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002028- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2029 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002030
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002031- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2032 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2033 tp_as_number pointer.
2034
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002035- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2036 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2037 (SF #681367)
2038
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002039- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2040 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2041 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2042 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002043
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002044Tests
2045-----
2046
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002047- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002048 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2049 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2050 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2051 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2052 pydoc.)
2053
2054- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2055
2056- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002057
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002058Windows
2059-------
2060
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002061- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2062 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2063 time).
2064
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002065- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2066 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2067
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002068- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2069 release without strong cryptography.
2070
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002071- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002072 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002073
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002074- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2075 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2076
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002077Mac
2078---
2079
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002080- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2081 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002082
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002083- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2084 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2085 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002086
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002087- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2088 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002089
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002090- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2091 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2092 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2093 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002094
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002095- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002096 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2097 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2098 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002099
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002100
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002101What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002102=================================
2103
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002104*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002105
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002106Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002107--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002108
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002109- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2110
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002111- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2112 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002113 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002114 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002115 a different meaning than before.
2116
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002117- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002118 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002119 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002120
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002121- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002122 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002123 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002124
2125- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2126 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2127 and deallocation.
2128
2129- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2130 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2131
2132- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2133 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2134 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2135 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2136 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2137
2138- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2139 now detected by the garbage collector.
2140
2141- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2142 [SF bug 519621]
2143
2144- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2145 identifier.
2146
2147- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2148 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2149 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2150 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2151 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2152 [SF bug 563060]
2153
2154- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2155 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2156 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2157 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2158 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2159
2160- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2161 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2162 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2163
2164- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2165
2166- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2167 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2168 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2169 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2170 state of the slots would be lost.)
2171
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002172Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002173-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002174
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002175- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002176 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2177 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2178 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2179 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002180 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2181 Jython 2.1.
2182
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002183- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002184 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002185 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2186 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2187 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2188 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2189 these, see PEP 302.
2190
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002191- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2192 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2193 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2194
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002195- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2196 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2197 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2198
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002199- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2200 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2201 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2202
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002203- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2204 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2205 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2206 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2207 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2208 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2209 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2210 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2211 releases or implementations.
2212
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002213- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002214 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2215 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002216
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002217- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2218 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2219
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002220- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2221 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2222 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2223
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002224- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2225 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2226
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002227- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2228 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002229 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2230 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002231
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002232- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2233 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2234 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2235 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2236 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2237
2238 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2239 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2240 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2241 pattern.
2242
2243 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2244 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2245 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2246 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2247
2248 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2249 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2250 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2251 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2252 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2253 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2254
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002255- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2256 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2257 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2258 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2259 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2260 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2261 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2262 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002263
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002264- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2265 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2266 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2267 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2268 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002269 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2270 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2271 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2272 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2273 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2274 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2275 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002276
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002277- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2278 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2279
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002280- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2281 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2282 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2283 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2284 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2285 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2286 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2287 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2288 to Zack Weinberg!
2289
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002290- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2291 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2292 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2293 type. This has been fixed now.
2294
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002295- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2296 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2297 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2298
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002299- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2300 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2301 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2302 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2303 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2304 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2305 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2306 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002307 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002308
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002309- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2310 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2311 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002312
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002313- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2314 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2315 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2316 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2317 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2318 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2319 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2320 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002321 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002322 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2323 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2324
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002325- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2326 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2327 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2328 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2329 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2330 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2331 this.)
2332
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002333- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2334 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002335 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002336 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002337 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2338 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002339 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2340 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002341
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002342- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2343 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2344 currently running.
2345
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002346- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2347 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2348 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2349 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2350
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002351- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2352 as directory names.
2353
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002354- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2355 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2356
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002357- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2358 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2359
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002360- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002361 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2362 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002363
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002364- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2365 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2366 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2367 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2368 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2369
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002370- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2371 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2372 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2373 removed.
2374
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002375- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2376 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2377 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2378
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002379- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2380 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2381 to __debug__.
2382
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002383- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2384 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2385 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2386
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002387- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2388 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2389 deprecated now.
2390
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002391- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2392 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2393 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002394
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002395- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2396 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2397 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2398 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2399 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002400
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002401- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2402 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2403
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002404- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2405 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2406 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002407 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002408 is backward compatible.
2409
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002410- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2411 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2412 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2413 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2414 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2415
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002416- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2417 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2418 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2419 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2420 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2421 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002422
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002423- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2424 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2425
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002426- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2427 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2428
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002429- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2430 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2431 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2432 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2433 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2434
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002435- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2436 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2437 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2438
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002439- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002440 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2441
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002442- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2443 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2444 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002445
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002446- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2447 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2448
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002449- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2450 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2451 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2452
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002453- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2454
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002455Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002456-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002457
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002458- Added three operators to the operator module:
2459 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2460 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2461 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2462
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002463- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2464
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002465- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2466 archives.
2467
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002468- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2469 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2470 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2471
2472 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2473
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002474- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2475 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2476 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002477 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002478
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002479- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2480 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2481 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2482 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002483 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2484 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2485 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2486 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002487
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002488- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2489 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002490
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002491- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2492
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002493- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2494 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2495
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002496- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2497 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2498 supported.
2499
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002500- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2501
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002502- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2503 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002504
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002505- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2506 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2507
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002508- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2509
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002510- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2511 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2512
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002513- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2514 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2515 functions but callable type objects.
2516
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002517- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002518 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002519 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002520
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002521- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2522 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002523
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002524- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2525 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002526
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002527- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2528 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2529 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2530 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2531
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002532- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2533 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002534
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002535- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2536 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2537 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2538 and __imul__.
2539
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002540- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002541 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2542 is called.
2543
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002544- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2545 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2546 interpreter was compiled.
2547
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002548- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2549 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2550 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002551 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002552 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2553 1, not 2.
2554
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002555- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2556 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2557 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2558 limit.
2559
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002560- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2561 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2562 bug #623464.
2563
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002564- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2565 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2566 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2567 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2568
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002569Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002570-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002571
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002572- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2573
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002574- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2575 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2576 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2577 with Python 2.3a2.
2578
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002579- os.path exposes getctime.
2580
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002581- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002582 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002583 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002584 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002585 unit tests of floating point results.
2586
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002587- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2588 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2589 has been increased.
2590
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002591- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2592 executed.
2593
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002594- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2595 postinstallation script.
2596
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002597- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2598 test the current module.
2599
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002600- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002601 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2602 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2603 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2604 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2605
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002606- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002607 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002608 Ward's Optik package.
2609
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002610- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2611 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2612 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2613 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2614
2615- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2616 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002617 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002618
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002619- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2620 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2621 shelf are binary pickles.
2622
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002623- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2624 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2625
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002626- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2627 modules are iterators now.
2628
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002629- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2630 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2631 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2632 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2633 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2634 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002635
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002636- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2637 with their entity value.
2638
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002639- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2640
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002641- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2642 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002643
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002644- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2645 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002646 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002647
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002648- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2649 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2650 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2651 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2652 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2653 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2654 main():
2655
2656 import locale
2657 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2658
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002659- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2660 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2661
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002662- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2663 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2664 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2665 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2666 to the new standard.
2667
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002668- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2669 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2670 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2671 an extension to the database.
2672
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002673- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2674 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2675 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2676 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002677 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002678
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002679- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002680 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002681
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002682- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2683 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2684 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2685 bounded integers.
2686
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002687- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2688 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2689 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2690 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2691 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2692 in existence.
2693
2694 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2695 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2696 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2697 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2698 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2699 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2700
2701 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2702 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2703 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2704 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2705
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002706- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2707 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2708 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2709
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002710- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2711
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002712- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2713 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2714 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2715 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2716
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002717- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2718 argument.
2719
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002720- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2721 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2722 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2723 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2724 [SF patch 560794].
2725
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002726- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2727 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2728 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002729 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2730 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2731 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002732
2733- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2734 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002735
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002736- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2737 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2738 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2739 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002740
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002741- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2742 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2743 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2744 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2745 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2746
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002747- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002748
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002749- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2750
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002751- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2752 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2753 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2754 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2755 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2756 identical to None.
2757
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002758- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2759 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2760 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2761 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2762 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2763 results now.
2764
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002765- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2766 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2767
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002768- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2769 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2770 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2771 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2772 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2773 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2774 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2775 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2776
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002777- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2778
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002779- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2780 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2781
2782- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2783 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2784 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2785 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2786 and other systems.
2787
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002788- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2789 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2790 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2791 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 +00002792 work well with these.
2793
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002794- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2795
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002796- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002797 connections.
2798
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002799- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2800 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2801 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2802
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002803- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2804 sets
2805
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002806- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2807 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2808 name.
2809
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002810- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2811 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2812 passed in.
2813
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002814- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002815 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002816 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2817 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002818
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002819- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2820
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002821- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2822
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002823- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2824 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2825 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2826
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002827- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2828 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2829 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2830 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002831 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002832
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002833- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002834 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002835 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002836
2837- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2838 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2839 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2840
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002841- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002842 the value of its expression argument.
2843
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002844- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2845 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2846 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2847
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002848- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2849 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2850 skipstone browser was included.
2851
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002852- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2853 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2854
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002855Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002856-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002857
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002858- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2859 names in addition to accepting file names.
2860
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002861- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2862 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2863 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2864 still used and useful.)
2865
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002866- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2867 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2868 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2869 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002870
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002871- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2872 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2873 the generated binary.
2874
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002875Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002876-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002877
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002878- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2879
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002880- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2881 except in the hands of experts.
2882
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002883- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002884 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2885 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2886 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002887
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002888- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2889 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2890 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2891 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2892 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2893 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2894 builds.
2895
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002896- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2897 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2898 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2899 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2900 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2901 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2902 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2903 new type.
2904
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002905- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002906
2907 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2908 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2909 positive infinities.
2910
2911 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2912 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2913 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2914 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2915 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2916 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2917 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2918
2919 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2920
2921 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2922
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002923- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2924 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2925 size of the executable.
2926
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002927- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2928 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2929 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2930 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002931
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002932- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2933
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002934- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2935 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2936 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002937
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002938- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2939 well as Unix.
2940
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002941- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2942 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2943 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2944 modules in the README file for details.
2945
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002946C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002947-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002948
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002949- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2950 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002951 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002952 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002953 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002954
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002955- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2956 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2957 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2958 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2959 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2960 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002961 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002962 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2963 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2964 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2965 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2966 aligned.)
2967
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002968- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2969 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2970 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2971
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002972- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2973 level.
2974
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002975- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2976 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2977 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2978 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2979 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2980
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002981- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2982 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2983 code.
2984
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002985- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2986 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2987 adjusting for negative indices.
2988
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002989- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2990 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2991 object.
2992
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002993- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2994 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2995 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2996
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002997- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2998 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002999
3000- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3001
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003002- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3003 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3004 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3005 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3006
3007- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3008
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003009- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003010
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003011- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003012 without going through the buffer API.
3013
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003015
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003016- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3017 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3018 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3019 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3020
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003021- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3022 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3023
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003024- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003025 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3026
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003027New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003028-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003029
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003030- OpenVMS is now supported.
3031
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003032- AtheOS is now supported.
3033
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003034- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3035
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003036- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3037
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003038Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003039-----
3040
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003041- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3042 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3043 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003044
3045Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003046-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003047
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003048- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3049 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3050 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3051 bugs.
3052 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003053 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003054 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3055 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003056 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003057
3058- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003059 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003060
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003061- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3062 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3063
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003064- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3065 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003066 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003067 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3068
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003069- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3070 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3071 use files" uninstall option).
3072
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003073- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3074
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003075- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3076 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3077
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003078- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3079 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3080 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3081
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003082- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3083 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3084 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3085 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3086 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003087 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3088 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3089 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003090
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003091- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003092 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003093 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3094 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3095 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3096 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3097 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3098 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3099 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3100 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3101 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3102 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3103 work around.
3104
3105- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3106 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3107 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3108 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3109 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3110 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3111 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3112 specified with O_CREAT too).
3113
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003114Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003115----
3116
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003117- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003118
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003119- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3120 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3121 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3122
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003123- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3124 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3125 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3126
3127- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3128 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3129 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3130 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3131 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3132 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3133 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3134 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003135
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003136- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3137 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3138 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003139
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003140- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3141 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3142 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3143 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3144 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003145
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003146- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3147 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3148 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003149
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003150- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3151 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003152
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003153- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3154 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3155 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3156 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3157 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003158
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003159- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3160 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3161 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3162
3163- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3164 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3165 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003166
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003167- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3168 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3169 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3170 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003171 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003172
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003173- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3174 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003175
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003176- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3177 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003178
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003179- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003180 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003181 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3182 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003183
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003184
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003185What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003186===============================
3187
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003188*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3189
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003190Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003191--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003192
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003193- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3194 with a custom metaclass.
3195
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003196Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003197-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003198
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003199- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3200 are proxies.
3201
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003202Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003203-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003204
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003205- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3206 very short strings.
3207
3208- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3209 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3210 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3211 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3212 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3213
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003214Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003216
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003217- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3218 close or delete time).
3219
3220- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3221 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3222
3223- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3224
3225- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003226 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003227
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003228Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003230
3231Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003232-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003233
3234C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003235-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003236
3237New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003238-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003239
3240Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003241-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003242
3243Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003244-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003245
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003246- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3247
3248- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3249 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3250
3251- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3252 deleted at process exit time.
3253
3254- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3255 in backslash.
3256
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003257Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003258----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003259
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003260- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3261 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3262 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3263
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003264
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003265What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003266===========================
3267
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003268*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3269
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003270Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003272
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003273- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3274 been extensively updated. See
3275
3276 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3277
3278 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3279
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003280- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3281 deleted!
3282
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003283- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3284 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3285 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3286 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3287 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3288
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003289- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3290
3291 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3292 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3293
3294 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3295 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3296 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3297 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3298 supported anyway.
3299
3300 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3301 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3302
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003303- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3304 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3305 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3306 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3307 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003308
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003309- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3310 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3311 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3312
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003313Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003315
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003316- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3317 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3318 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3319 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3320 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3321 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003322 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3323 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3324 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3325 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003326
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003327- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3328 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3329 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3330
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003331Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003332-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003333
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003334- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3335
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003336Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003337-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003338
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003339- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3340 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3341 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3342 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3343 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3344 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3345
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003346- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3347
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003348- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3349
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003350- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3351
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003352- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3353 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3354 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3355
3356- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3357
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003358Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003359-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003360
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003361- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3362 off a search on Google.
3363
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003364Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003365-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003366
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003367- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3368 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3369 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3370 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3371 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3372 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3373 other platforms should do likewise.
3374
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003375- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3376 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3377 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3378
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003379C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003380-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003381
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003382- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3383 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3384 producing key-value pairs.
3385
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003386- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003387 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003388 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3389 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3390 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3391 previously went unchallenged.
3392
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003393New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003394-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003395
3396Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003397-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003398
3399Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003400-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003401
3402Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003403----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003404
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003405- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3406 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003407
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003408- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3409 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3410 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3411 home.
3412
3413
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003414What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003415===========================
3416
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003417*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3418
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003419Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003420--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003421
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003422- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3423 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003424
3425 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003426 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003427
3428 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3429 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003430 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003431 This needs to be documented.
3432
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003433- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3434 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3435
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003436- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3437 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3438 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3439
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003440- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3441 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3442
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003443- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3444 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3445 class forbids it).
3446
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003447- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3448 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3449 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3450
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003451- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3452
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003453Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003454-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003455
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003456- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3457 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003458 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003459
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003460- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3461 (like 1 + '').
3462
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003463Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003464-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003465
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003466- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3467 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3468 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3469 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003470 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003471 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3472
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003473- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3474 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3475 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3476 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3477
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003478- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3479 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003480 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3481 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3482 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003483
3484- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3485 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003486
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003487- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3488 bytes on its input.
3489
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003490Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003491-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003492
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003493- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003494 convenience function.
3495
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003496- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3497 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3498 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003499 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3500 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3501 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3502 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3503 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3504 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003505
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003506- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3507 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3508 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3509 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3510
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003511- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3512 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3513 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3514
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003515- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3516 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3517 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3518 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3519
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003520- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3521 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003522 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003523 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3524 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3525 new -l and -e options.
3526
3527- statcache is now deprecated.
3528
3529- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3530 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003531 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003532 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3533 time properly taken into account.
3534
3535- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3536 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3537 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3538 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3539
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003540Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003542
3543Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003545
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003546- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3547 is built with libdb3 if available.
3548
3549- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3550
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003551C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003553
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003554- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3555 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3556 PySequence_Size().
3557
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003558- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3559
3560- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3561 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3562 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3563
3564- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3565 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3566
3567- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3568 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3569
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003570New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003572
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003573- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3574 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3575
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003576- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3577 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3578
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003579- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3580
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003581Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003583
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003584- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3585 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3586
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003587Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003588-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003589
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003590Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003591----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003592
3593- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3594 removed completely in the next release.
3595
3596- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3597 OSX.
3598
3599- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3600 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3601
3602- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3603
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003604
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003605What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003606===========================
3607
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3609
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003610Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003612
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003613- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003614 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003615 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003616 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3617 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003618 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3619 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003620 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3621 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003622
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003623- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3624 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3625
3626- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3627 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3628
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003629Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003631
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003632- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3633 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3634 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3635 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3636 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3637 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3638 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3639 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3640
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003641- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3642 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3643 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3644 example).
3645
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003646- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003647 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003648 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003649 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003650
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003651- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3652 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3653 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003654 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003655
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003656- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3657 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3658 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3659 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3660 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3661 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3662
3663 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3664
3665 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3666
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003667Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003668-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003669
3670- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3671
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003672- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3673
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003674- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3675 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003676
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003677- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3678 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3679 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3680 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3681 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3682 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003683 attributes.
3684
3685- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3686 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3687 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003688
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003689- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3690 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3691 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003692
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003693- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3694 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3695 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003696 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3697 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3698
3699- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3700 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003701
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003702Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003703-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003704
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003705- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3706 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3707
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003708- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3709 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3710 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3711 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3712
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003713- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3714 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3715 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3716 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3717
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003718 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3719 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3720 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3721 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3722 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3723 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3724 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3725 without losing information).
3726
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003727- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003728 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3729 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3730 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3731 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3732 module).
3733
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003734 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003735 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3736 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3737 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3738 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003739
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003740- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003741 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3742 encoding.
3743
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003744- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3745 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3746
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003748 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3749
3750- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3751 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3752 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3753 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3754
3755- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3756
3757- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3758 ON, and OFF.
3759
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003760- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3761 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3762
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003763Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003764-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003765
3766- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3767 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3768 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003769
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003770- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3771 been added: -X and -E.
3772
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003773Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003775
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003776- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3777 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3778
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003779C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003781
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003782- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3783 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3784 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3785 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3786 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3787
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003788- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3789 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3790 as long) arguments.
3791
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003792- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3793 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3794 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3795 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3796 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3797 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3798
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003799- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3800 input.
3801
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003802New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003803-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003804
3805Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003807
3808Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003810
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003811- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3812 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3813 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3814
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003815- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3816 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3817 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003818 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003819
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003820 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3821 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3822 import signal
3823 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003824
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003825 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003826 while 1:
3827 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003829 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3830 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3831 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3832 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003833
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003834
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003835What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3836===========================
3837
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3839
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003840Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003842
3843- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3844 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3845 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3846
3847- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3848 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3849 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3850 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3851 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3852 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3853 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003854
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003855- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003856 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003857 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3858 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3859 associate a docstring with a property.
3860
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003861- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3862 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3863 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3864 other built-in object types.
3865
3866- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3867 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3868 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3869 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3870 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3871
3872- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3873 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3874
3875- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3876 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003877 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003878 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3879 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3880 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3881 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3882 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3883
3884- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3885 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3886 class.
3887
3888- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3889 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3890 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3891 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3892
3893- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3894 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3895 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3896 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3897
3898- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3899 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3900
3901- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3902 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3903 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3904 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3905 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003906 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003907 with the same value as s.
3908
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003909- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3910
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003911Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003913
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003914- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3915
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003916- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3917 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3918 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3919 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3920 objects.
3921
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003922- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3923 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003924 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3925 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3926
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003927- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3928 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3929 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3930
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003931Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003932-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003933
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003934- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3935 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3936 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3937 by the instances.
3938
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003939- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3940 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3941 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3942
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003943- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3944 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3945 before the entire comparison is complete.
3946
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003947- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3948 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3949 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3950
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003951- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3952 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3953 getwriter().
3954
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003955- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3956 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3957
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003958- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003959 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3960 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3961
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003962- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3963 iterable object.
3964
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003965- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3966 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003967
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003968- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3969 authentication.
3970
3971- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3972 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003973
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003974- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003975 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3976 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3977 a sample driver.)
3978
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003979Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003980-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003981
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003982- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3983 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3984 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3985 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3986 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3987 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3988 kernel has large file support.
3989
3990- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3991 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3992 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3993 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3994 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3995
3996- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3997 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3998 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3999
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004000C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004002
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004003- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4004 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4005
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004006New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004008
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004009- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4010 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4011
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004012Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004014
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004015- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4016 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4017 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4018 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4019 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4020
4021- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4022 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4023 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4024 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4025
4026- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4027 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4028
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004029Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004031
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004032- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004033 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4034 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004035
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004036
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004037What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4038===========================
4039
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4041
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004042Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004044
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004045- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4046 big to represent as a C double.
4047
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004048- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4049 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4050 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4051 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4052 restriction).
4053
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004054- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4055 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4056 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4057 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4058 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4059
4060 >>> dir([])
4061 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4062 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4063 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4064 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4065 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4066 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4067 'reverse', 'sort']
4068
4069 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4070
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004071- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004072 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4073 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4074 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4075 OverflowError exception.
4076
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004077- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004078 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004079 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4080 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4081 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4082 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4083 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004084 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4086 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4087
4088 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4089 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4090 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4091 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004092
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004093- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004094 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4095 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4096 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4097 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4098 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4099 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4100 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4101 once it is created.
4102
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004103- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4104 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4105 (key, value) pairs.
4106
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004107- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004108 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4109 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4110
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004111- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4112 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4113 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4114 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4115 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004116
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004117- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004118 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4119 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4120
4121 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4122
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004123- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004124 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4125
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004126Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004127-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004128
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004129- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004130 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4131 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004132
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004133- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4134 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4135 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4136 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4137 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4138 in this area anymore).
4139
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004140- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4141 threading.Timer.
4142
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004143- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4144 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4145
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004146- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004147 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4148
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004149- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004150 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4151 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4152 converted to Python longs.
4153
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004154- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004155 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4156
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004157- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4158 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4159 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4160
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004161Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004162-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004163
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004164- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4165 division operators as per PEP 238.
4166
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004167Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004169
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004170- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4171 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4172 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4173 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4174
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004175C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004177
4178- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004179
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004180- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4181 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004182 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004183
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004184 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4185 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004186 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004187 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004188
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004189- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004190 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4191 module:
4192
4193 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004194
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004195 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4196 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004197
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004198 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4199 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004200
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004201 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4202
4203 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4204
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004205- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004206 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4207 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4208 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004209
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004210New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004212
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004213- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4214 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4215 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4216 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4217 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004218
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004219Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004220-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004221
4222Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004224
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004225- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4226 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4227 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4228 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004229 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4230 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4231 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4232 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4233 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004234
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004235- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004236 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4237
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004238
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004239What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4240===========================
4241
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4243
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004244Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004245-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004246
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004247- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4248 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4249
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004250- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4251 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4252 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004253
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004254- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4255 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4256 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4257 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004258
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004259- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4260
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004262
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004263Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004265
4266- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004267 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004268 the module docstring for details.
4269
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004270Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004272
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004273- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004274 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4275 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4276 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004277
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004278- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4279 Nick Mathewson.
4280
4281Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004283
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004284- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4285 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4286 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4287 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4288 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4289 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4290 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4291 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4292
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004293- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4294 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4295 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4296 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4297
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004298- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4299 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4300 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4301 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4302 come a long way).
4303
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004304- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4305 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4306 write filters for these warnings).
4307
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004308- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4309 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4310 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4311 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4312 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4313
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004314- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4315 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4316 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4317 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4318 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4319 older distribution.
4320
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004321Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004323
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004324- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4325 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004326 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004327
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004328- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4329 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4330 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4331
4332- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4333
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004334- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4335
4336- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4337
4338- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4339
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004341
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004342- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4343
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004344New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004346
4347C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004349
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004350- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4351 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4352 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4353 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4354 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4355 against buffer overruns.
4356
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004357- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004358 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4359 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004360 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4361 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4362 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4363
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004364- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4365 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4366 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4367 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4368 deprecated.
4369
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004370Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004372
4373- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4374 relevant is found.
4375
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004376
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004377What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004378===========================
4379
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004380*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4381
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004382Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004384
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004385- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4386 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4387 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4388 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4389 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4390 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4391 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4392 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004393 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004394 repaired.
4395
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004396- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004397 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004398 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4399 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4400 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4401 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4402 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4403 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4404 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4405 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4406
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004407- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4408 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4409 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4410 leading BMO character).
4411
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004412- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4413 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4414 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4415
4416 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4417 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4418 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004419
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004420 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4421 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4422 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4423 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4424 for various simple to use conversions.
4425
4426 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4427 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4428
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004429 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4430 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4431 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4432 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4433 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4434 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4435 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4436 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4437 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4438 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4439 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4440 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4441 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4442 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4443 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004444
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004445- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4446 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4447 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004448 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004449 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004450
4451 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004452 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4453 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4454 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4455 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4456 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004457 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4458 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004459
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004460 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4461 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4462 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004463 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004464
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004465- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4466 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4467 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4468 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4469 floating arithmetic,
4470
4471 x = 9007199254740992.0
4472 print long(x)
4473
4474 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4475 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4476 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4477 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4478 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4479 functions are of good quality).
4480
4481 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4482 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4483 algorithms to break.
4484
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004485- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4486 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4487 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4488 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4489 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4490 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4491 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4492 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4493 order.
4494
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004495- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4496 operation along the most common code paths.
4497
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004498- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4499 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4500
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004501- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4502 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4503 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4504 {}.update(UserDict())
4505
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004506- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4507 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4508 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4509 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4510 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4511 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4512 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4513 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4514
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004515- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004516 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004518 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004519 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4520 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004521 join() method of strings
4522 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004523 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4524 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004526 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004527
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004528- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4529 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4530
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004531- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4532 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4533
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004534- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4535 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4536 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4537 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4538
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004539- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4540 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004541 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004542 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4543 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004544
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004545- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4546
4547
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004548Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004550
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004551- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004552 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004553 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4554 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4555
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004556- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4557 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4558
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004559- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4560 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4561 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4562 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4563
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004564- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4565 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4566 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4567
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004568- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4569
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004570- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4571
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004572- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4573 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4574 that are still imported into string.py).
4575
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004576- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4577
4578- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4579 Now it does.
4580
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004581- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4582
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004583- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4584 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4585 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4586 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4587 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004588 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4589 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004590
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004591- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4592 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4593 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4594 'help(object)'.
4595
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004596Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004598
4599- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004600 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004601 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4602 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4603
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004604- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004605 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4606 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004607
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004608C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004610
4611- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4612 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004613
4614----
4615
4616**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**