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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.)
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Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000015- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
16 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
17 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
18
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000019- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
20 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
21 improves their performance (about 35%).
22
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000023- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
24 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
25 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
26
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000027- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
28 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
29 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
30 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
31
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000032- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
33 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
34 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
35 length is not known).
36
37- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
38 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000039 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
40 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000041 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
42
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000043- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
44 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
45 keyword arguments.
46
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000047- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
48 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
49 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
50
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000051- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
52 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
53 cases.
54
55- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
56 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
57 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
58 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
59 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
60 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
61 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
62 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
63 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
64 a release build.
65
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000066- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
67 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
68
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000069- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000070 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000071
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000072- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
73 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
74 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
75 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
76 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
77 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
78 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
79 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
80 destroyed.
81
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000082- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
83 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
84 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
85 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
86 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
87 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
88 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
89 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
90
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000091- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
92 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
93 character other than a space.
94
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000095- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
96 by the function object or by the method object, the function
97 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
98 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
99 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
100 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
101 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
102 attributes with the same name.
103
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000104- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
105 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
106 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
107 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
108 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
109 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
110 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
111 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
112 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
113 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
114 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
115 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
116 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
117 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000118
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000119- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
120 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
121 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
122 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
123 This has been repaired.
124
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000125- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
126
127- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
128
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000129- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
130 over a sequence.
131
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000132- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
133 from any iterable.
134
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000135- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
136
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000137- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
138 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
139 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
140 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
141 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
142 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
143 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
144 records with equal keys is unchanged).
145
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000146- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
147 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
148 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
149
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000150- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
151 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
152 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
153 freelist.
154
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000155- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
156 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
157
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000158- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
159 number.
160
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000161- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
162 a TypeError exception.
163
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000164- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
165 820195.
166
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000167- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
168 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
169 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
170
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000171- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
172 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
173 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000174
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000175- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
176 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
177 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
178
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000179- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
180 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
181 method is called as necessary.
182
183
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000184Extension modules
185-----------------
186
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000187- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
188 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000189 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
190 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
191 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000192
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000193- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
194 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
195 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
196 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
197
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000198- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
199 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
200 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
201 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
202 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
203 #897625.
204
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000205- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
206 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
207
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000208- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
209 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
210 and pops on either side of the deque.
211
212- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
213 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
214
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000215- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
216 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
217 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
218 other functions that expect a function argument.
219
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000220- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
221
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000222- os.getsid was added.
223
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000224- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
225 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
226 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
227
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000228- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
229
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000230- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
231
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000232- readline.clear_history was added.
233
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000234- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
235
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000236- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
237
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000238- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
239
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000240- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
241
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000242- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
243
244- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
245
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000246- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
247
248- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
249
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000250- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
251 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
252 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
253
254- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
255 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
256 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
257 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
258 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
259 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
260 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
261
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000262- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
263 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
264 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
265 the Unix uniq filter.
266
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000267- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
268 iterators from a single iterable.
269
270- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
271 of raising a TypeError exception.
272
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000273- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
274 as parameter.
275
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000276Library
277-------
278
Brett Cannoncc454662004-03-20 21:31:33 +0000279- site.py now removes paths that do not exist.
280
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000281- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
282
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000283- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
284
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000285- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
286 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
287 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
288 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
289 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
290 accordingly.
291
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000292- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
293 decoding standards.
294
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000295- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
296 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
297 called for all requests.
298
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000299- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
300 they are passed to the compiler.
301
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000302- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
303 indent, width and depth.
304
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000305- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
306 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
307
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000308- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
309 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
310
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000311- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
312
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000313- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
314
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000315- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
316
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000317- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
318 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
319
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000320- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
321 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000322
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000323- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
324 a string).
325
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000326- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
327
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000328- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
329
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000330- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
331
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000332- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
333
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000334- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
335 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
336 list of fieldnames.
337
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000338- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
339 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
340
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000341- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
342
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000343- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
344 empty lists.
345
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000346- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
347 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
348 and shelves.
349
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000350- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
351 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
352
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000353- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000354 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
355 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000356
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000357- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
358 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000359 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000360
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000361- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000362 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
363 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
364
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000365- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
366 and removed in Py2.4.
367
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000368- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
369
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000370- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
371
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000372Tools/Demos
373-----------
374
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000375- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
376 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
377
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000378- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
379
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000380- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
381 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
382 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
383 destination in situations where both files are given.
384
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000385- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
386 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
387 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
388 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
389
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000390- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
391
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000392- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
393 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
394 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
395 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
396 now.
397
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000398- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
399 in effect
400
401- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
402 C-c C-h
403
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000404- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
405 -d option was given.
406
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000407Build
408-----
409
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000410- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
411 removed.
412
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000413- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
414 supported (see PEP 11).
415
416- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
417
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000418- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
419
420- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
421 (see PEP 11).
422
423- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
424 sizeof(char) must be 1.
425
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000426C API
427-----
428
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000429- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
430 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
431
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000432- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
433 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
434 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
435 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
436 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
437
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000438- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
439 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
440 about 10% faster.
441
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000442- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
443 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
444
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000445- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
446 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
447 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
448 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
449
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000450New platforms
451-------------
452
453Tests
454-----
455
456Windows
457-------
458
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000459- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
460 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
461 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
462 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
463
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000464- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
465 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
466 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
467
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000468Mac
469----
470
471
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000472What's New in Python 2.3 final?
473===============================
474
475*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
476
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000477IDLE
478----
479
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000480- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
481 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
482 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
483 context-menu actions.
484
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000485- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
486 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
487 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
488 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
489 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
490 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
491 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
492 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
493 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
494
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000495
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000496What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
497=============================================
498
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000499*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000500
501Core and builtins
502-----------------
503
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000504- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000505 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000506 comment at the end are still unsupported.
507
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000508Extension modules
509-----------------
510
511- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
512 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
513 than once. This has been fixed.
514
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000515- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
516 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
517 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
518 call.
519
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000520- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
521
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000522Library
523-------
524
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000525- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
526 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
527
528- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
529 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
530 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
531 restored.
532
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000533IDLE
534----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000535
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000536- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000537
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000538Build
539-----
540
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000541- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
542 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
543
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000544C API
545-----
546
547Windows
548-------
549
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000550- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
551 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
552
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000553- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
554
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000555Mac
556---
557
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000558- Various fixes to pimp.
559
560- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
561
562- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
563 more problems than it solves.
564
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000565
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000566What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
567=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000568
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000569*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
570
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000571Core and builtins
572-----------------
573
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000574- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
575 by sys.setcheckinterval().
576
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000577- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
578 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000579 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000580
581- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
582 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
583 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000584 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000585
586- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
587 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000588
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000589- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
590 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
591 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
592
593- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000594 770247.
595
596- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000597
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000598Extension modules
599-----------------
600
601- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
602 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
603
604- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
605
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000606- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
607
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000608- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
609 contained within the _strptime module.
610
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000611- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
612 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
613
614- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000615 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
616
617- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
618 the find_class attribute, if present.
619
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000620- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000621
622 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
623 (SF bug 763298).
624
625 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000626 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
627 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
628 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000629
630 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
631
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000632Library
633-------
634
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000635- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
636
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000637- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
638 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
639 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
640 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
641 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
642 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
643 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
644 or Tester().
645
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000646- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
647 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
648 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
649 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
650 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
651 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
652 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
653 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
654 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000655
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000656 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000657
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000658- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
659 weren't before was an oversight.
660
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000661- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
662 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
663
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000664- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
665 when there are no lines.
666
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000667- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
668 which could occur with Tk 8.4
669
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000670- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
671 to child processes.
672
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000673- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
674
675- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
676
677- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
678 xmlrpclib.
679
680- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
681 responses.
682
683- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
684 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
685
686- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
687 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
688 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
689
690- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
691 used as patterns.
692
693- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
694 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
695 than Tk 8.3.
696
697- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
698
699- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000700
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000701Tools/Demos
702-----------
703
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000704- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
705
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000706- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
707
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000708- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000709
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000710Build
711-----
712
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000713- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
714
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000715- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
716
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000717- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
718 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000719
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000720- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
721 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
722 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000723
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000724C API
725-----
726
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000727- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
728 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
729
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000730Windows
731-------
732
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000733- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
734 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
735 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
736 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
737 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
738 Python exception ::
739
740 thread.error: can't start new thread
741
742 is raised now.
743
744- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
745 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
746 instead of from DLL teardown.
747
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000748Mac
749---
750
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000751- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000752 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000753 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
754 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
755 the executable in the bundle.
756
757- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000758
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000759- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
760
761- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
762 on Panther.
763
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000764What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
765================================
766
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000767*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000768
769Core and builtins
770-----------------
771
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000772- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
773 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
774 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
775 with the -i option.
776
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000777- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
778 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
779
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000780- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
781 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
782
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000783- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
784 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
785 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
786 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
787 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
788 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
789 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
790 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
791 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
792 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
793 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
794 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
795 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000796
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000797- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
798 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
799 embedded in a lambda expression.
800
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000801- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
802 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
803 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
804 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
805 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
806
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000807- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
808 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
809 matches the restriction on classic classes.
810
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000811- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
812 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
813
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000814- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
815 It's writable again.
816
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000817- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
818 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
819 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000820 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000821
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000822- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
823 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
824 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
825
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000826Extension modules
827-----------------
828
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000829- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
830 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
831
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000832- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
833 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
834 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
835 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
836
837- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
838 collection.
839
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000840- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
841 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
842 unique within a single program run.
843
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000844- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
845 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
846
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000847- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
848 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
849
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000850- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
851 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000852
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000853- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
854
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000855- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
856 Fixes SF bug #730685.
857
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000858- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
859 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
860 for many BSD-derived systems.
861
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000862
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000863Library
864-------
865
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000866- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
867 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
868 primary ones:
869
870 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
871 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
872 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
873
874 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
875 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
876 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
877 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
878 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
879 framework features (which doctest lacks).
880
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000881- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
882 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
883 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
884 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
885 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
886 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
887 argument.
888
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000889- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
890 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
891 in the archive.
892
893- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
894 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
895
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000896- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
897 569574).
898
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000899- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
900 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
901 no more.
902
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000903- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
904 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
905 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
906 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
907 code coverage.
908
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000909- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
910 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
911 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000912 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
913 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000914
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000915- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
916 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
917 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000918 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000919
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000920- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
921
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000922- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
923 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
924 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
925 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
926
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000927- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
928 handling.
929
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000930- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
931 __doc__ of data descriptors.
932
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000933- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
934 in socket.py.
935
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000936- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
937
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000938- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
939 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
940 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
941 opener with proxy support.
942
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000943- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
944
945- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
946
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000947Tools/Demos
948-----------
949
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000950- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
951
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000952- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
953
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000954- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
955 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000956
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000957- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
958 files.
959
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000960Build
961-----
962
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000963- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000964 different root directory.
965
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000966C API
967-----
968
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000969- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
970 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
971 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
972 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
973 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
974 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
975 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
976 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
977 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
978 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
979
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000980- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
981 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
982 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
983 from Python.
984
985
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000986New platforms
987-------------
988
989None this time.
990
991Tests
992-----
993
994- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
995 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
996
997Windows
998-------
999
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001000- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1001
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001002- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1003 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1004 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1005 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1006 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1007 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1008 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1009 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1010 that's what it's for.
1011
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001012Mac
1013---
1014
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001015- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1016 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1017 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1018 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001019- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1020 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1021- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001022
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001023SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1024------------------------------------
1025
1026430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1027598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1028622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1029661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1030683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1031697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1032713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1033724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1034727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1035729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1036730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1037731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1038732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1039733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1040735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1041740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1042744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1043745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1044747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1045749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1046751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1047753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1048755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1049757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1050760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1051
1052
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001053What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1054================================
1055
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001056*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001057
1058Core and builtins
1059-----------------
1060
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001061- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1062 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1063
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001064- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1065 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1066 and cannot be strings).
1067
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001068- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1069 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1070 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1071 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1072
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001073- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1074 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1075 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1076 Python itself.
1077
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001078- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1079 the referenced object, if it has one.
1080
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001081- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1082 the thread started at
1083 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1084
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001085- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1086 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1087 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1088 placed on a list index.
1089
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001090- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1091 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1092 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1093 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1094
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001095- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1096 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1097 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1098 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1099 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1100 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1101 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1102
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001103- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1104 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1105 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1106 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1107 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1108
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001109- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1110 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001111
1112- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1113 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1114 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1115 #693195.)
1116
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001117- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1118 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001119
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001120- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001121 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001122 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1123 interpreter executions, would fail.
1124
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001125- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001126 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001127 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001128
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001129Extension modules
1130-----------------
1131
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001132- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1133 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1134 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1135 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1136
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001137- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1138 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1139
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001140- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1141 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1142 and Greg Chapman.)
1143
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001144- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1145 recursively.
1146
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001147- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001148 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1149 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1150 leaks.
1151
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001152- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1153
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001154- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1155 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1156 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1157 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1158 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1159 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1160 #705836.
1161
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001162- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001163 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1164
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001165- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1166 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1167 See SF bug #692416.
1168
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001169- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1170 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1171
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001172- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1173 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1174 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001175
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001176- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001177 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1178 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1179
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001180- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1181 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1182 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1183 timeouts to work properly.
1184
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001185Library
1186-------
1187
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001188- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1189 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1190 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1191 future release.
1192
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001193- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1194 for querying platform dependent features.
1195
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001196- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001197
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001198- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1199 pickle protocol versions.
1200
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001201- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1202 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1203 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1204
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001205- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1206
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001207- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1208 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1209 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1210 modules.
1211
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001212- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1213 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1214 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1215
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001216- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1217 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1218
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001219- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1220 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1221 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1222
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001223- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001224 MS Office extensions.
1225
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001226- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1227 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1228
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001229- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1230 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1231
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001232- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1233 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1234 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1235 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1236 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1237 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1238
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001239- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1240 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1241 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001242
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001243- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1244 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1245 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1246
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001247- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1248
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001249- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1250 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1251 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1252
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001253Tools/Demos
1254-----------
1255
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001256- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1257 See the module docstring for details.
1258
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001259Build
1260-----
1261
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001262- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1263 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001264
1265C API
1266-----
1267
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001268- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1269
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001270- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1271 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1272 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1273
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001274- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1275 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001276
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001277 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1278 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1279 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001280
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001281- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001282 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1283
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001284- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1285 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1286 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001287
1288New platforms
1289-------------
1290
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001291None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001292
1293Tests
1294-----
1295
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001296- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1297 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001298
1299Windows
1300-------
1301
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001302- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1303 function.
1304
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001305- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1306 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001307
1308Mac
1309---
1310
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001311- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1312 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001313
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001314- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1315 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001316
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001317- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1318 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1319 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001320
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001321- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001322 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1323 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001324
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001325- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1326 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001327
1328
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001329What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1330=================================
1331
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001332*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001333
1334Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001335-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001336
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001337- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1338 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1339 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1340
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001341- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1342 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1343 (SF patch #664376.)
1344
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001345- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1346 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1347 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1348 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1349 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1350 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001351 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001352
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001353- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1354 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1355 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1356 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001357 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001358
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001359- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1360 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1361 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1362 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1363 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1364 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1365 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1366 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1367 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1368 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1369 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1370
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001371- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1372 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1373 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1374 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1375 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1376 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1377
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001378- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1379 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1380
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001381- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1382 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1383 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1384 case.)
1385
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001386- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1387 passed as unicode strings.
1388
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001389- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1390 See SF bug #683467.
1391
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001392- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1393 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1394
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001395- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1396
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001397- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1398
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001399- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1400 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1401 arguments.
1402
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001403- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1404 See SF bug #667147.
1405
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001406- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001407 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001408 See SF bug #676155.
1409
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001410- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001411 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001412 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1413 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1414 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1415 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1416 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1417 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001418
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001419Extension modules
1420-----------------
1421
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001422- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1423 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1424 tp_as_number pointer.
1425
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001426- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1427 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1428 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1429 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1430 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1431
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001432- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1433
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001434- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1435
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001436- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001437 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001438 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1439 patch #678531.)
1440
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001441- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1442 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1443
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001444- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1445 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1446
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001447- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1448
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001449- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1450 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1451 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1452
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001453- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1454
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001455- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1456 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1457
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001458- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001459
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001460- datetime changes:
1461
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001462 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1463
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001464 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1465 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1466 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1467 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1468 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1469 now.
1470
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001471 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001472 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1473 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001474
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001475 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001476 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001477 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1478 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1479 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1480 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001481
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001482 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1483 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1484 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001485 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1486
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001487 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1488 by a later example coded by Guido.
1489
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001490 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001491 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1492 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1493 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001494 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1495 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1496
1497 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1498 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1499 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1500 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1501 tzinfo subclass instance.
1502
1503 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1504 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1505 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1506 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1507 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1508 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1509 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1510 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001511
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001512 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1513 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1514 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1515 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1516 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001517 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1518
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001519 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001520
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001521 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1522 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1523 as a naive datetime object.
1524
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001525 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1526 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1527 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1528
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001529 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1530 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1531 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1532 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1533 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1534 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1535 comparison.
1536
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001537 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1538 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1539 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1540 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001541 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001542
1543 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001544
1545 and ::
1546
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001547 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1548
1549 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1550 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1551 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1552 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1553
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001554 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1555 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1556 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1557 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1558 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1559
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001560 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1561 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001562 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1563 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001564
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001565Library
1566-------
1567
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001568- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1569 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1570
1571- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1572 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1573 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1574 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1575 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1576 See PEP 307 for details.
1577
1578- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1579 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1580
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001581- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1582 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001583 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001584 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1585 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001586 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001587
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001588- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1589 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1590
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001591- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1592 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1593 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1594
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001595- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1596
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001597- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1598 exception.
1599
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001600- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1601 class.
1602
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001603- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1604 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1605 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1606
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001607- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1608 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1609
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001610- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001611 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1612 See SF bug #659228.
1613
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001614- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1615 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1616 See SF patch #651082.
1617
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001618- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001619
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001620- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1621 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1622
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001623- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001624 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001625
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001626- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1627 DOS paths from other platforms.
1628
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001629Tools/Demos
1630-----------
1631
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001632- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1633 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1634 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1635 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1636 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1637 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1638 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1639 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1640 example:
1641
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001642 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1643 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001644
1645 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1646
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001647
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001648Build
1649-----
1650
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001651- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1652 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1653 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001654 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1655
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001656 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1657
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001658- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1659 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1660 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1661 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1662 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1663 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1664 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1665 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1666 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1667
1668- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1669 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1670 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1671 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1672
1673- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1674 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1675
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001676C API
1677-----
1678
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001679- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1680 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001681
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001682- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1683 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1684 tp_as_number pointer.
1685
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001686- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1687 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1688 (SF #681367)
1689
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001690- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1691 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1692 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1693 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001694
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001695Tests
1696-----
1697
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001698- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001699 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1700 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1701 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1702 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1703 pydoc.)
1704
1705- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1706
1707- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001708
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001709Windows
1710-------
1711
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001712- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1713 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1714 time).
1715
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001716- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1717 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1718
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001719- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1720 release without strong cryptography.
1721
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001722- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001723 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001724
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001725- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1726 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1727
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001728Mac
1729---
1730
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001731- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1732 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001733
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001734- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1735 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1736 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001737
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001738- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1739 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001740
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001741- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1742 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1743 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1744 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001745
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001746- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001747 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1748 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1749 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001750
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001751
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001752What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001753=================================
1754
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001755*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001756
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001757Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001758--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001759
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001760- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1761
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001762- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1763 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001764 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001765 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001766 a different meaning than before.
1767
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001768- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001769 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001770 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001771
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001772- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001773 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001774 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001775
1776- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1777 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1778 and deallocation.
1779
1780- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1781 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1782
1783- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1784 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1785 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1786 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1787 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1788
1789- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1790 now detected by the garbage collector.
1791
1792- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1793 [SF bug 519621]
1794
1795- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1796 identifier.
1797
1798- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1799 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1800 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1801 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1802 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1803 [SF bug 563060]
1804
1805- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1806 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1807 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1808 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1809 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1810
1811- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1812 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1813 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1814
1815- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1816
1817- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1818 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1819 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1820 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1821 state of the slots would be lost.)
1822
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001823Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001824-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001825
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001826- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001827 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1828 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1829 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1830 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001831 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1832 Jython 2.1.
1833
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001834- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001835 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001836 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1837 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1838 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1839 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1840 these, see PEP 302.
1841
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001842- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1843 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1844 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1845
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001846- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1847 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1848 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1849
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001850- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1851 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1852 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1853
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001854- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1855 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1856 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1857 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1858 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1859 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1860 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1861 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1862 releases or implementations.
1863
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001864- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001865 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1866 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001867
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001868- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1869 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1870
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001871- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1872 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1873 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1874
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001875- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1876 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1877
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001878- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1879 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001880 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1881 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001882
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001883- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1884 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1885 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1886 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1887 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1888
1889 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1890 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1891 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1892 pattern.
1893
1894 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1895 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1896 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1897 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1898
1899 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1900 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1901 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1902 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1903 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1904 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1905
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001906- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1907 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1908 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1909 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1910 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1911 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1912 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1913 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001914
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001915- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1916 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1917 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1918 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1919 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001920 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1921 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1922 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1923 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1924 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1925 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1926 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001927
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001928- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1929 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1930
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001931- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1932 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1933 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1934 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1935 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1936 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1937 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1938 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1939 to Zack Weinberg!
1940
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001941- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1942 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1943 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1944 type. This has been fixed now.
1945
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001946- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1947 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1948 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1949
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001950- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1951 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1952 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1953 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1954 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1955 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1956 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1957 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001958 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001959
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001960- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1961 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1962 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001963
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001964- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1965 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1966 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1967 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1968 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1969 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1970 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1971 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001972 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001973 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1974 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1975
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001976- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1977 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1978 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1979 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1980 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1981 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1982 this.)
1983
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001984- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1985 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001986 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001987 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001988 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1989 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001990 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1991 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001992
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001993- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1994 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1995 currently running.
1996
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001997- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1998 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1999 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2000 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2001
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002002- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2003 as directory names.
2004
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002005- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2006 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2007
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002008- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2009 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2010
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002011- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002012 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2013 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002014
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002015- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2016 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2017 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2018 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2019 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2020
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002021- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2022 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2023 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2024 removed.
2025
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002026- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2027 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2028 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2029
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002030- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2031 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2032 to __debug__.
2033
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002034- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2035 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2036 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2037
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002038- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2039 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2040 deprecated now.
2041
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002042- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2043 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2044 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002045
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002046- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2047 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2048 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2049 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2050 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002051
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002052- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2053 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2054
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002055- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2056 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2057 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002058 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002059 is backward compatible.
2060
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002061- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2062 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2063 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2064 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2065 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2066
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002067- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2068 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2069 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2070 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2071 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2072 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002073
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002074- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2075 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2076
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002077- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2078 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2079
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002080- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2081 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2082 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2083 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2084 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2085
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002086- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2087 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2088 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2089
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002090- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002091 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2092
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002093- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2094 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2095 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002096
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002097- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2098 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2099
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002100- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2101 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2102 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2103
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002104- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2105
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002106Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002107-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002108
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002109- Added three operators to the operator module:
2110 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2111 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2112 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2113
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002114- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2115
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002116- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2117 archives.
2118
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002119- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2120 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2121 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2122
2123 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2124
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002125- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2126 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2127 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002128 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002129
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002130- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2131 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2132 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2133 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002134 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2135 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2136 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2137 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002138
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002139- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2140 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002141
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002142- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2143
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002144- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2145 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2146
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002147- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2148 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2149 supported.
2150
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002151- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2152
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002153- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2154 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002155
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002156- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2157 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2158
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002159- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2160
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002161- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2162 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2163
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002164- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2165 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2166 functions but callable type objects.
2167
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002168- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002169 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002170 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002171
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002172- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2173 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002174
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002175- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2176 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002177
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002178- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2179 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2180 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2181 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2182
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002183- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2184 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002185
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002186- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2187 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2188 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2189 and __imul__.
2190
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002191- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002192 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2193 is called.
2194
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002195- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2196 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2197 interpreter was compiled.
2198
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002199- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2200 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2201 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002202 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002203 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2204 1, not 2.
2205
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002206- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2207 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2208 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2209 limit.
2210
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002211- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2212 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2213 bug #623464.
2214
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002215- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2216 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2217 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2218 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2219
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002220Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002221-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002222
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002223- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2224
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002225- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2226 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2227 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2228 with Python 2.3a2.
2229
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002230- os.path exposes getctime.
2231
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002232- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002233 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002234 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002235 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002236 unit tests of floating point results.
2237
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002238- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2239 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2240 has been increased.
2241
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002242- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2243 executed.
2244
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002245- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2246 postinstallation script.
2247
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002248- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2249 test the current module.
2250
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002251- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002252 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2253 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2254 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2255 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2256
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002257- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002258 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002259 Ward's Optik package.
2260
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002261- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2262 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2263 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2264 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2265
2266- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2267 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002268 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002269
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002270- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2271 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2272 shelf are binary pickles.
2273
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002274- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2275 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2276
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002277- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2278 modules are iterators now.
2279
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002280- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2281 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2282 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2283 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2284 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2285 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002286
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002287- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2288 with their entity value.
2289
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002290- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2291
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002292- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2293 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002294
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002295- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2296 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002297 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002298
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002299- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2300 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2301 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2302 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2303 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2304 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2305 main():
2306
2307 import locale
2308 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2309
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002310- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2311 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2312
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002313- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2314 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2315 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2316 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2317 to the new standard.
2318
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002319- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2320 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2321 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2322 an extension to the database.
2323
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002324- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2325 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2326 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2327 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002328 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002329
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002330- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002331 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002332
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002333- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2334 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2335 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2336 bounded integers.
2337
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002338- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2339 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2340 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2341 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2342 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2343 in existence.
2344
2345 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2346 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2347 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2348 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2349 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2350 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2351
2352 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2353 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2354 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2355 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2356
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002357- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2358 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2359 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2360
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002361- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2362
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002363- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2364 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2365 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2366 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2367
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002368- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2369 argument.
2370
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002371- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2372 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2373 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2374 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2375 [SF patch 560794].
2376
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002377- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2378 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2379 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002380 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2381 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2382 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002383
2384- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2385 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002386
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002387- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2388 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2389 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2390 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002391
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002392- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2393 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2394 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2395 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2396 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2397
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002398- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002399
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002400- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2401
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002402- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2403 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2404 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2405 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2406 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2407 identical to None.
2408
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002409- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2410 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2411 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2412 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2413 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2414 results now.
2415
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002416- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2417 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2418
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002419- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2420 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2421 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2422 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2423 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2424 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2425 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2426 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2427
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002428- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2429
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002430- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2431 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2432
2433- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2434 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2435 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2436 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2437 and other systems.
2438
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002439- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2440 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2441 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2442 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 +00002443 work well with these.
2444
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002445- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2446
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002447- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002448 connections.
2449
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002450- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2451 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2452 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2453
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002454- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2455 sets
2456
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002457- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2458 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2459 name.
2460
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002461- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2462 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2463 passed in.
2464
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002465- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002466 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002467 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2468 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002469
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002470- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2471
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002472- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2473
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002474- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2475 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2476 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2477
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002478- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2479 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2480 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2481 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002482 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002483
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002484- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002485 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002486 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002487
2488- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2489 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2490 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2491
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002492- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002493 the value of its expression argument.
2494
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002495- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2496 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2497 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2498
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002499- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2500 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2501 skipstone browser was included.
2502
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002503- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2504 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2505
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002506Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002507-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002508
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002509- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2510 names in addition to accepting file names.
2511
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002512- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2513 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2514 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2515 still used and useful.)
2516
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002517- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2518 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2519 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2520 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002521
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002522- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2523 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2524 the generated binary.
2525
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002526Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002527-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002528
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002529- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2530
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002531- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2532 except in the hands of experts.
2533
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002534- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002535 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2536 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2537 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002538
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002539- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2540 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2541 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2542 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2543 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2544 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2545 builds.
2546
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002547- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2548 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2549 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2550 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2551 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2552 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2553 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2554 new type.
2555
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002556- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002557
2558 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2559 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2560 positive infinities.
2561
2562 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2563 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2564 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2565 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2566 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2567 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2568 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2569
2570 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2571
2572 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2573
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002574- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2575 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2576 size of the executable.
2577
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002578- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2579 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2580 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2581 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002582
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002583- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2584
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002585- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2586 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2587 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002588
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002589- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2590 well as Unix.
2591
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002592- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2593 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2594 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2595 modules in the README file for details.
2596
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002597C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002598-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002599
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002600- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2601 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002602 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002603 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002604 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002605
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002606- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2607 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2608 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2609 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2610 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2611 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002612 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002613 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2614 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2615 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2616 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2617 aligned.)
2618
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002619- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2620 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2621 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2622
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002623- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2624 level.
2625
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002626- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2627 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2628 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2629 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2630 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2631
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002632- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2633 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2634 code.
2635
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002636- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2637 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2638 adjusting for negative indices.
2639
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002640- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2641 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2642 object.
2643
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002644- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2645 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2646 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2647
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002648- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2649 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002650
2651- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2652
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002653- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2654 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2655 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2656 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2657
2658- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2659
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002660- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002661
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002662- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002663 without going through the buffer API.
2664
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002665- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002666
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002667- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2668 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2669 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2670 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2671
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002672- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2673 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2674
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002675- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002676 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2677
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002678New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002679-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002680
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002681- OpenVMS is now supported.
2682
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002683- AtheOS is now supported.
2684
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002685- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2686
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002687- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2688
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002689Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002690-----
2691
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002692- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2693 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2694 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002695
2696Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002697-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002698
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002699- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2700 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2701 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2702 bugs.
2703 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002704 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002705 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2706 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002707 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002708
2709- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002710 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002711
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002712- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2713 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2714
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002715- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2716 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002717 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002718 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2719
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002720- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2721 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2722 use files" uninstall option).
2723
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002724- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2725
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002726- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2727 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2728
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002729- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2730 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2731 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2732
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002733- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2734 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2735 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2736 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2737 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002738 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2739 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2740 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002741
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002742- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002743 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002744 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2745 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2746 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2747 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2748 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2749 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2750 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2751 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2752 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2753 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2754 work around.
2755
2756- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2757 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2758 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2759 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2760 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2761 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2762 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2763 specified with O_CREAT too).
2764
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002765Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002766----
2767
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002768- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002769
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002770- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2771 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2772 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2773
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002774- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2775 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2776 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2777
2778- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2779 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2780 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2781 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2782 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2783 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2784 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2785 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002786
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002787- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2788 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2789 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002790
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002791- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2792 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2793 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2794 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2795 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002796
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002797- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2798 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2799 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002800
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002801- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2802 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002803
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002804- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2805 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2806 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2807 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2808 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002809
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002810- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2811 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2812 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2813
2814- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2815 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2816 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002817
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002818- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2819 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2820 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2821 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002822 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002823
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002824- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2825 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002826
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002827- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2828 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002829
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002830- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002831 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002832 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2833 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002834
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002835
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002836What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002837===============================
2838
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002839*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2840
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002841Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002842--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002843
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002844- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2845 with a custom metaclass.
2846
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002847Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002848-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002849
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002850- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2851 are proxies.
2852
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002853Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002854-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002855
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002856- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2857 very short strings.
2858
2859- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2860 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2861 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2862 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2863 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2864
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002865Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002866-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002867
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002868- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2869 close or delete time).
2870
2871- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2872 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2873
2874- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2875
2876- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002877 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002878
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002879Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002880-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002881
2882Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002883-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002884
2885C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002886-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002887
2888New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002889-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002890
2891Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002892-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002893
2894Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002895-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002896
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002897- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2898
2899- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2900 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2901
2902- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2903 deleted at process exit time.
2904
2905- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2906 in backslash.
2907
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002908Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002909----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002910
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002911- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2912 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2913 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2914
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002915
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002916What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002917===========================
2918
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002919*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2920
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002921Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002922--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002923
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002924- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2925 been extensively updated. See
2926
2927 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2928
2929 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2930
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002931- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2932 deleted!
2933
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002934- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2935 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2936 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2937 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2938 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2939
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002940- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2941
2942 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2943 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2944
2945 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2946 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2947 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2948 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2949 supported anyway.
2950
2951 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2952 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2953
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002954- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2955 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2956 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2957 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2958 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002959
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002960- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2961 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2962 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2963
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002964Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002965-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002966
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002967- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2968 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2969 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2970 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2971 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2972 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002973 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2974 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2975 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2976 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002977
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002978- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2979 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2980 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2981
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002982Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002983-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002984
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002985- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2986
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002987Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002989
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002990- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2991 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2992 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2993 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2994 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2995 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2996
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002997- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2998
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002999- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3000
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003001- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3002
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003003- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3004 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3005 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3006
3007- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3008
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003009Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003011
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003012- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3013 off a search on Google.
3014
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003015Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003016-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003017
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003018- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3019 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3020 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3021 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3022 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3023 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3024 other platforms should do likewise.
3025
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003026- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3027 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3028 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3029
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003030C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003031-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003032
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003033- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3034 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3035 producing key-value pairs.
3036
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003037- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003038 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003039 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3040 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3041 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3042 previously went unchallenged.
3043
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003044New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003045-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003046
3047Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003048-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003049
3050Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003051-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003052
3053Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003055
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003056- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3057 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003058
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003059- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3060 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3061 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3062 home.
3063
3064
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003065What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003066===========================
3067
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003068*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3069
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003070Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003071--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003072
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003073- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3074 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003075
3076 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003077 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003078
3079 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3080 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003081 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003082 This needs to be documented.
3083
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003084- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3085 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3086
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003087- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3088 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3089 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3090
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003091- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3092 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3093
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003094- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3095 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3096 class forbids it).
3097
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003098- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3099 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3100 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3101
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003102- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3103
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003104Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003105-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003106
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003107- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3108 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003109 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003110
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003111- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3112 (like 1 + '').
3113
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003114Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003115-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003116
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003117- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3118 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3119 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3120 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003121 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003122 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3123
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003124- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3125 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3126 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3127 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3128
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003129- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3130 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003131 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3132 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3133 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003134
3135- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3136 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003137
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003138- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3139 bytes on its input.
3140
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003141Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003142-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003143
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003144- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003145 convenience function.
3146
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003147- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3148 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3149 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003150 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3151 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3152 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3153 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3154 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3155 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003156
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003157- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3158 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3159 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3160 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3161
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003162- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3163 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3164 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3165
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003166- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3167 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3168 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3169 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3170
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003171- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3172 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003173 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003174 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3175 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3176 new -l and -e options.
3177
3178- statcache is now deprecated.
3179
3180- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3181 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003182 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003183 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3184 time properly taken into account.
3185
3186- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3187 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3188 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3189 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3190
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003191Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003192-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003193
3194Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003195-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003196
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003197- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3198 is built with libdb3 if available.
3199
3200- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3201
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003202C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003203-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003204
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003205- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3206 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3207 PySequence_Size().
3208
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003209- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3210
3211- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3212 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3213 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3214
3215- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3216 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3217
3218- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3219 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3220
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003221New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003222-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003223
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003224- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3225 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3226
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003227- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3228 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3229
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003230- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3231
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003232Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003233-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003234
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003235- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3236 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3237
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003238Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003240
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003241Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003243
3244- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3245 removed completely in the next release.
3246
3247- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3248 OSX.
3249
3250- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3251 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3252
3253- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3254
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003255
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003256What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003257===========================
3258
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003259*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3260
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003261Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003262--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003263
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003264- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003265 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003266 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003267 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3268 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003269 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3270 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003271 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3272 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003273
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003274- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3275 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3276
3277- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3278 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3279
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003280Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003281-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003282
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003283- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3284 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3285 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3286 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3287 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3288 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3289 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3290 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3291
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003292- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3293 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3294 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3295 example).
3296
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003297- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003298 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003299 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003300 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003301
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003302- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3303 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3304 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003305 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003306
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003307- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3308 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3309 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3310 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3311 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3312 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3313
3314 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3315
3316 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3317
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003318Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003320
3321- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3322
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003323- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3324
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003325- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3326 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003327
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003328- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3329 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3330 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3331 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3332 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3333 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003334 attributes.
3335
3336- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3337 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3338 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003339
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003340- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3341 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3342 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003343
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003344- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3345 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3346 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003347 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3348 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3349
3350- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3351 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003352
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003353Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003355
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003356- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3357 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3358
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003359- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3360 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3361 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3362 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3363
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003364- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3365 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3366 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3367 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3368
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003369 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3370 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3371 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3372 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3373 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3374 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3375 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3376 without losing information).
3377
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003378- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003379 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3380 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3381 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3382 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3383 module).
3384
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003385 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003386 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3387 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3388 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3389 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003390
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003391- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003392 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3393 encoding.
3394
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003395- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3396 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3397
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003398- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003399 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3400
3401- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3402 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3403 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3404 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3405
3406- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3407
3408- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3409 ON, and OFF.
3410
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003411- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3412 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3413
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003414Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003415-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003416
3417- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3418 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3419 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003420
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003421- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3422 been added: -X and -E.
3423
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003424Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003425-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003426
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003427- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3428 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3429
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003430C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003431-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003432
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003433- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3434 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3435 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3436 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3437 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3438
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003439- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3440 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3441 as long) arguments.
3442
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003443- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3444 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3445 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3446 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3447 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3448 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3449
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003450- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3451 input.
3452
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003453New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003454-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003455
3456Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003457-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003458
3459Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003460-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003461
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003462- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3463 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3464 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3465
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003466- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3467 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3468 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003469 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003470
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003471 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3472 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3473 import signal
3474 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003475
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003476 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003477 while 1:
3478 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003480 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3481 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3482 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3483 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003484
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003485
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003486What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3487===========================
3488
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003489*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3490
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003491Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003492--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003493
3494- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3495 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3496 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3497
3498- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3499 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3500 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3501 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3502 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3503 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3504 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003505
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003506- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003507 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003508 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3509 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3510 associate a docstring with a property.
3511
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003512- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3513 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3514 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3515 other built-in object types.
3516
3517- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3518 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3519 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3520 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3521 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3522
3523- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3524 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3525
3526- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3527 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003528 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003529 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3530 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3531 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3532 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3533 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3534
3535- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3536 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3537 class.
3538
3539- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3540 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3541 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3542 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3543
3544- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3545 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3546 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3547 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3548
3549- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3550 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3551
3552- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3553 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3554 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3555 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3556 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003557 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003558 with the same value as s.
3559
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003560- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3561
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003562Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003563----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003564
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003565- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3566
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003567- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3568 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3569 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3570 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3571 objects.
3572
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003573- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3574 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003575 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3576 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3577
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003578- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3579 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3580 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3581
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003582Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003583-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003584
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003585- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3586 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3587 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3588 by the instances.
3589
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003590- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3591 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3592 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3593
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003594- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3595 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3596 before the entire comparison is complete.
3597
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003598- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3599 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3600 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3601
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003602- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3603 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3604 getwriter().
3605
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003606- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3607 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3608
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003609- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003610 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3611 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3612
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003613- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3614 iterable object.
3615
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003616- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3617 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003618
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003619- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3620 authentication.
3621
3622- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3623 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003624
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003625- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003626 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3627 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3628 a sample driver.)
3629
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003630Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003631-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003632
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003633- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3634 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3635 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3636 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3637 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3638 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3639 kernel has large file support.
3640
3641- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3642 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3643 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3644 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3645 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3646
3647- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3648 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3649 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3650
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003651C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003652-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003653
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003654- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3655 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3656
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003657New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003658-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003659
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003660- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3661 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3662
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003663Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003664-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003665
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003666- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3667 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3668 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3669 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3670 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3671
3672- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3673 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3674 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3675 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3676
3677- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3678 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3679
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003680Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003682
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003683- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003684 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3685 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003686
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003687
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003688What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3689===========================
3690
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3692
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003693Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003695
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003696- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3697 big to represent as a C double.
3698
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003699- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3700 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3701 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3702 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3703 restriction).
3704
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003705- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3706 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3707 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3708 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3709 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3710
3711 >>> dir([])
3712 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3713 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3714 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3715 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3716 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3717 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3718 'reverse', 'sort']
3719
3720 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3721
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003722- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003723 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3724 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3725 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3726 OverflowError exception.
3727
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003728- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003729 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003730 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3731 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3732 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3733 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3734 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003735 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003736 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3737 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3738
3739 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3740 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3741 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3742 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003743
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003744- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003745 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3746 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3747 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3748 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3749 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3750 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3751 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3752 once it is created.
3753
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003754- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3755 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3756 (key, value) pairs.
3757
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003758- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003759 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3760 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3761
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003762- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3763 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3764 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3765 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3766 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003767
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003768- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003769 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3770 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3771
3772 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3773
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003774- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003775 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3776
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003777Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003778-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003779
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003780- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003781 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3782 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003783
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003784- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3785 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3786 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3787 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3788 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3789 in this area anymore).
3790
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003791- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3792 threading.Timer.
3793
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003794- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3795 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3796
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003797- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003798 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3799
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003800- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003801 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3802 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3803 converted to Python longs.
3804
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003805- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003806 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3807
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003808- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3809 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3810 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3811
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003812Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003814
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003815- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3816 division operators as per PEP 238.
3817
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003818Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003820
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003821- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3822 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3823 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3824 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3825
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003826C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003827-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003828
3829- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003830
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003831- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3832 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003833 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003834
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3836 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003837 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003839
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003840- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003841 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3842 module:
3843
3844 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003845
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003846 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3847 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003848
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003849 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3850 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003851
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003852 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3853
3854 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3855
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003856- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003857 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3858 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3859 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003860
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003861New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003863
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003864- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3865 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3866 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3867 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3868 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003869
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003870Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003872
3873Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003874-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003875
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003876- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3877 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3878 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3879 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003880 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3881 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3882 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3883 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3884 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003885
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003886- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003887 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3888
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003889
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003890What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3891===========================
3892
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3894
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003895Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003896-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003897
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003898- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3899 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3900
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003901- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3902 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3903 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003904
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003905- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3906 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3907 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3908 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003909
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003910- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3911
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003913
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003914Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003915-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003916
3917- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003918 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003919 the module docstring for details.
3920
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003921Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003923
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003924- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003925 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3926 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3927 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003928
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003929- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3930 Nick Mathewson.
3931
3932Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003934
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003935- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3936 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3937 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3938 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3939 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3940 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3941 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3942 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3943
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003944- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3945 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3946 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3947 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3948
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003949- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3950 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3951 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3952 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3953 come a long way).
3954
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003955- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3956 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3957 write filters for these warnings).
3958
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003959- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3960 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3961 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3962 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3963 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3964
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003965- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3966 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3967 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3968 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3969 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3970 older distribution.
3971
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003972Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003974
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003975- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3976 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003977 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003978
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003979- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3980 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3981 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3982
3983- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3984
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003985- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3986
3987- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3988
3989- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3990
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003992
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003993- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3994
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003995New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003997
3998C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003999-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004000
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004001- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4002 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4003 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4004 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4005 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4006 against buffer overruns.
4007
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004008- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004009 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4010 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004011 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4012 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4013 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4014
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004015- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4016 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4017 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4018 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4019 deprecated.
4020
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004021Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004022-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004023
4024- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4025 relevant is found.
4026
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004027
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004028What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004029===========================
4030
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4032
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004033Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004034----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004035
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004036- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4037 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4038 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4039 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4040 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4041 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4042 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4043 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004044 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004045 repaired.
4046
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004047- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004048 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004049 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4050 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4051 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4052 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4053 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4054 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4055 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4056 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4057
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004058- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4059 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4060 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4061 leading BMO character).
4062
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004063- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4064 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4065 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4066
4067 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4068 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4069 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004070
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004071 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4072 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4073 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4074 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4075 for various simple to use conversions.
4076
4077 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4078 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4079
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4081 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4082 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4083 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4084 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4085 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4086 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4087 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4088 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4089 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4090 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4091 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4092 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4093 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4094 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004095
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004096- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4097 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4098 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004099 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004100 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004101
4102 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004103 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4104 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4105 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4106 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4107 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004108 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4109 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004110
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004111 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4112 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4113 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004114 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004115
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004116- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4117 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4118 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4119 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4120 floating arithmetic,
4121
4122 x = 9007199254740992.0
4123 print long(x)
4124
4125 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4126 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4127 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4128 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4129 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4130 functions are of good quality).
4131
4132 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4133 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4134 algorithms to break.
4135
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004136- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4137 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4138 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4139 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4140 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4141 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4142 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4143 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4144 order.
4145
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004146- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4147 operation along the most common code paths.
4148
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004149- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4150 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4151
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004152- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4153 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4154 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4155 {}.update(UserDict())
4156
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004157- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4158 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4159 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4160 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4161 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4162 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4163 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4164 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4165
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004166- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004167 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004169 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004170 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4171 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004172 join() method of strings
4173 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004174 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4175 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004177 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004178
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004179- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4180 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4181
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004182- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4183 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4184
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004185- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4186 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4187 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4188 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4189
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004190- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4191 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004192 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004193 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4194 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004195
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004196- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4197
4198
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004199Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004200-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004201
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004202- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004203 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004204 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4205 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4206
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004207- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4208 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4209
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004210- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4211 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4212 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4213 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4214
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004215- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4216 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4217 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4218
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004219- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4220
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004221- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4222
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004223- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4224 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4225 that are still imported into string.py).
4226
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004227- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4228
4229- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4230 Now it does.
4231
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004232- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4233
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004234- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4235 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4236 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4237 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4238 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004239 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4240 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004241
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004242- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4243 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4244 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4245 'help(object)'.
4246
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004247Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004249
4250- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004251 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004252 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4253 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4254
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004255- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004256 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4257 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004258
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004259C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004261
4262- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4263 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264
4265----
4266
4267**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**