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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +000015- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
16 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
17 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
18 objects now (one object instead of three).
19
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +000020- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
21 Windows DLLs.
22
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +000023- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
24
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +000025- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
26 a new .pyc magic.
27
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000028- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
29 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
30 be there.
31
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000032- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
33 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
34 the LC_NUMERIC category.
35
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000036- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
37 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
38 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
39
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000040- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
41
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000042- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
43 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
44 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000045
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000046- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
47 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
48
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000049- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
50
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000051- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
52 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
53
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000054- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
55
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000056- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
57
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000058- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
59 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
60
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000061- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
62 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
63 Fixes bug #858016 .
64
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000065- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
66 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
67 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
68
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000069- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
70 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
71 improves their performance (about 35%).
72
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000073- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
74 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
75 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
76
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000077- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
78 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
79 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
80 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
81
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000082- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
83 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
84 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
85 length is not known).
86
87- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
88 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000089 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
90 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000091 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
92
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000093- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
94 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
95
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000096- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
97 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
98 keyword arguments.
99
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000100- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
101 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
102 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
103
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000104- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
105 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
106 cases.
107
108- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
109 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
110 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
111 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
112 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
113 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
114 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
115 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
116 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
117 a release build.
118
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000119- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
120 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
121
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000122- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000123 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000124
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000125- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
126 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
127 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
128 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
129 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
130 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
131 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
132 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
133 destroyed.
134
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000135- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
136 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
137 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
138 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
139 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
140 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
141 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
142 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
143
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000144- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
145 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
146 character other than a space.
147
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000148- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
149 by the function object or by the method object, the function
150 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
151 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
152 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
153 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
154 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
155 attributes with the same name.
156
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000157- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
158 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
159 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
160 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
161 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
162 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
163 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
164 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
165 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
166 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
167 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
168 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
169 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
170 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000171
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000172- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
173 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
174 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
175 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
176 This has been repaired.
177
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000178- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
179
180- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
181
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000182- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
183 over a sequence.
184
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000185- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000186 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000187
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000188- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
189
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000190- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
191 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
192 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
193 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
194 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
195 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
196 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
197 records with equal keys is unchanged).
198
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000199- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
200 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
201 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
202
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000203- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
204 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
205 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
206 freelist.
207
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000208- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
209 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
210
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000211- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
212 number.
213
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000214- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
215 a TypeError exception.
216
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000217- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
218 820195.
219
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000220- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
221 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
222 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
223
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000224- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
225 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
226 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000227
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000228- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
229 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
230 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
231
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000232- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
233 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000234 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000235
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000236- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000237 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
238 the first call.
239
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000240
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000241Extension modules
242-----------------
243
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000244- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
245 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
246
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000247- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
248 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
249 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
250 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
251 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
252 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
253 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000254
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000255- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
256
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000257- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
258
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000259- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
260 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
261
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000262- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
263 fewer false positives.
264
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000265- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
266 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
267
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000268- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
269 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
270
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000271- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
272 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000273 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
274 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
275 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000276
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000277- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
278 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
279 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
280 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
281
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000282- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
283 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
284 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
285 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
286 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
287 #897625.
288
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000289- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
290 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
291
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000292- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
293 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
294 and pops on either side of the deque.
295
296- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
297 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
298
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000299- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
300 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
301 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
302 other functions that expect a function argument.
303
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000304- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
305
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000306- os.getsid was added.
307
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000308- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
309 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
310 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
311
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000312- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
313
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000314- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
315
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000316- readline.clear_history was added.
317
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000318- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
319
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000320- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
321
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000322- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
323
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000324- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
325
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000326- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
327
328- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
329
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000330- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
331
332- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
333
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000334- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
335 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
336 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
337
338- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
339 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
340 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
341 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
342 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
343 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
344 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
345
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000346- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
347 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
348 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
349 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000350
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000351- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
352 iterators from a single iterable.
353
354- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
355 of raising a TypeError exception.
356
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000357- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
358 as parameter.
359
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000360Library
361-------
362
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000363- Added Decimal.py per PEP 327.
364
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000365- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
366 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000367
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000368- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
369 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
370
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000371- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
372
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000373- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000374 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000375
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000376- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
377 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
378
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000379- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
380
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000381- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
382 on cygwin and mingw32.
383
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000384- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
385
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000386- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
387 module.
388
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000389- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
390 installation scheme for all platforms.
391
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000392- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000393 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000394
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000395- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
396 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
397 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
398
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000399- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
400 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
401 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
402
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000403- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
404
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000405- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
406
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000407- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
408 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
409
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000410- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
411 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
412 type pattern with the same value exists.
413
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000414- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
415 when run from the command prompt).
416
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000417- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
418 not taken into consideration when caching value.
419
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000420- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
421 default sort).
422
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000423- Added global runctx function to profile module
424
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000425- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
426
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000427- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
428
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000429- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
430
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000431- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
432 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
433 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
434 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
435 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
436 accordingly.
437
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000438- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
439 decoding standards.
440
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000441- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
442 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
443 called for all requests.
444
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000445- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
446 they are passed to the compiler.
447
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000448- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
449 indent, width and depth.
450
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000451- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
452 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
453
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000454- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
455 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
456
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000457- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
458
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000459- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
460
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000461- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
462
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000463- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
464 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
465
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000466- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000467 for better performance.
468
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000469- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000470
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000471- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
472 a string).
473
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000474- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
475
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000476- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
477
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000478- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
479
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000480- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
481
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000482- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
483 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
484 list of fieldnames.
485
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000486- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
487 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
488
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000489- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
490
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000491- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
492 empty lists.
493
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000494- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
495 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
496 and shelves.
497
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000498- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
499 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
500
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000501- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000502 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
503 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000504
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000505- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
506 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000507 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000508
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000509- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000510 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
511 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
512
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000513- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
514 and removed in Py2.4.
515
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000516- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
517
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000518- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
519
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000520Tools/Demos
521-----------
522
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000523- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
524 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
525
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000526- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
527
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000528- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
529 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
530 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
531 destination in situations where both files are given.
532
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000533- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
534 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
535 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
536 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
537
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000538- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
539
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000540- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
541 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
542 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
543 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
544 now.
545
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000546- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
547 in effect
548
549- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
550 C-c C-h
551
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000552- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
553 -d option was given.
554
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000555Build
556-----
557
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000558- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
559 build under OS X.
560
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000561- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
562 --enable-profiling.
563
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000564- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
565 is configured --with-tsc.
566
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000567- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
568 on AMD64.
569
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000570- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
571 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
572
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000573- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
574 removed.
575
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000576- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
577 supported (see PEP 11).
578
579- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
580
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000581- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
582
583- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
584 (see PEP 11).
585
586- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
587 sizeof(char) must be 1.
588
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000589C API
590-----
591
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000592- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
593 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
594 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
595
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000596- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
597 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
598 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
599 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
600
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000601- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
602 generator objects.
603
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000604- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
605 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000606 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
607 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000608
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000609- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
610 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
611
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000612- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
613 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
614 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
615 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
616 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
617
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000618- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
619 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
620 about 10% faster.
621
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000622- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
623 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
624
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000625- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
626 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
627 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
628 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
629
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000630New platforms
631-------------
632
633Tests
634-----
635
636Windows
637-------
638
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000639- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
640 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
641 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
642 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
643
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000644- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
645 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
646 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
647
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000648Mac
649----
650
651
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000652What's New in Python 2.3 final?
653===============================
654
655*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
656
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000657IDLE
658----
659
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000660- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
661 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
662 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
663 context-menu actions.
664
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000665- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
666 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
667 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
668 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
669 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
670 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
671 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
672 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
673 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
674
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000675
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000676What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
677=============================================
678
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000679*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000680
681Core and builtins
682-----------------
683
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000684- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000685 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000686 comment at the end are still unsupported.
687
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000688Extension modules
689-----------------
690
691- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
692 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
693 than once. This has been fixed.
694
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000695- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
696 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
697 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
698 call.
699
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000700- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
701
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000702Library
703-------
704
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000705- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
706 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
707
708- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
709 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
710 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
711 restored.
712
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000713IDLE
714----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000715
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000716- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000717
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000718Build
719-----
720
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000721- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
722 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
723
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000724C API
725-----
726
727Windows
728-------
729
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000730- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
731 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
732
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000733- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
734
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000735Mac
736---
737
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000738- Various fixes to pimp.
739
740- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
741
742- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
743 more problems than it solves.
744
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000745
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000746What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
747=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000748
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000749*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
750
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000751Core and builtins
752-----------------
753
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000754- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
755 by sys.setcheckinterval().
756
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000757- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
758 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000759 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000760
761- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
762 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
763 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000764 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000765
766- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
767 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000768
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000769- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
770 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
771 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
772
773- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000774 770247.
775
776- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000777
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000778Extension modules
779-----------------
780
781- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
782 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
783
784- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
785
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000786- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
787
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000788- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
789 contained within the _strptime module.
790
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000791- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
792 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
793
794- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000795 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
796
797- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
798 the find_class attribute, if present.
799
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000800- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000801
802 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
803 (SF bug 763298).
804
805 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000806 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
807 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
808 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000809
810 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
811
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000812Library
813-------
814
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000815- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
816
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000817- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
818 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
819 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
820 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
821 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
822 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
823 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
824 or Tester().
825
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000826- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
827 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
828 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
829 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
830 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
831 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
832 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
833 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
834 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000835
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000836 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000837
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000838- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
839 weren't before was an oversight.
840
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000841- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
842 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
843
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000844- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
845 when there are no lines.
846
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000847- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
848 which could occur with Tk 8.4
849
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000850- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
851 to child processes.
852
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000853- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
854
855- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
856
857- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
858 xmlrpclib.
859
860- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
861 responses.
862
863- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
864 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
865
866- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
867 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
868 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
869
870- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
871 used as patterns.
872
873- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
874 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
875 than Tk 8.3.
876
877- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
878
879- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000880
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000881Tools/Demos
882-----------
883
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000884- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
885
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000886- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
887
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000888- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000889
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000890Build
891-----
892
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000893- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
894
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000895- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
896
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000897- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
898 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000899
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000900- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
901 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
902 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000903
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000904C API
905-----
906
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000907- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
908 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
909
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000910Windows
911-------
912
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000913- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
914 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
915 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
916 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
917 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
918 Python exception ::
919
920 thread.error: can't start new thread
921
922 is raised now.
923
924- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
925 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
926 instead of from DLL teardown.
927
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000928Mac
929---
930
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000931- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000932 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000933 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
934 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
935 the executable in the bundle.
936
937- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000938
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000939- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
940
941- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
942 on Panther.
943
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000944What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
945================================
946
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000947*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000948
949Core and builtins
950-----------------
951
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000952- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
953 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
954 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
955 with the -i option.
956
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000957- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
958 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
959
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000960- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
961 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
962
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000963- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
964 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
965 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
966 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
967 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
968 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
969 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
970 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
971 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
972 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
973 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
974 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
975 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000976
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000977- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
978 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
979 embedded in a lambda expression.
980
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000981- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
982 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
983 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
984 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
985 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
986
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000987- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
988 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
989 matches the restriction on classic classes.
990
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000991- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
992 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
993
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000994- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
995 It's writable again.
996
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000997- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
998 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
999 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001000 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001001
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001002- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1003 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1004 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1005
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001006Extension modules
1007-----------------
1008
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001009- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1010 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1011
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001012- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1013 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1014 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1015 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1016
1017- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1018 collection.
1019
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001020- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1021 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1022 unique within a single program run.
1023
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001024- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1025 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1026
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001027- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1028 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1029
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001030- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1031 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001032
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001033- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1034
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001035- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1036 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1037
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001038- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1039 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1040 for many BSD-derived systems.
1041
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001042
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001043Library
1044-------
1045
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001046- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1047 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1048 primary ones:
1049
1050 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1051 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1052 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1053
1054 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1055 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1056 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1057 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1058 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1059 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1060
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001061- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1062 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1063 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1064 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1065 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1066 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1067 argument.
1068
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001069- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1070 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1071 in the archive.
1072
1073- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1074 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1075
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001076- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1077 569574).
1078
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001079- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1080 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1081 no more.
1082
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001083- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1084 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1085 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1086 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1087 code coverage.
1088
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001089- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1090 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1091 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001092 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1093 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001094
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001095- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1096 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1097 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001098 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001099
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001100- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1101
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001102- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1103 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1104 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1105 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1106
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001107- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1108 handling.
1109
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001110- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1111 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1112
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001113- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1114 in socket.py.
1115
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001116- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1117
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001118- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1119 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1120 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1121 opener with proxy support.
1122
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001123- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1124
1125- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1126
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001127Tools/Demos
1128-----------
1129
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001130- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1131
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001132- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1133
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001134- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1135 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001136
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001137- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1138 files.
1139
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001140Build
1141-----
1142
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001143- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001144 different root directory.
1145
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001146C API
1147-----
1148
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001149- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1150 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1151 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1152 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1153 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1154 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1155 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1156 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1157 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1158 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1159
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001160- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1161 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1162 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1163 from Python.
1164
1165
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001166New platforms
1167-------------
1168
1169None this time.
1170
1171Tests
1172-----
1173
1174- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1175 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1176
1177Windows
1178-------
1179
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001180- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1181
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001182- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1183 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1184 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1185 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1186 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1187 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1188 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1189 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1190 that's what it's for.
1191
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001192Mac
1193---
1194
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001195- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1196 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1197 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1198 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001199- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1200 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1201- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001202
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001203SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1204------------------------------------
1205
1206430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1207598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1208622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1209661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1210683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1211697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1212713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1213724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1214727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1215729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1216730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1217731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1218732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1219733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1220735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1221740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1222744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1223745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1224747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1225749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1226751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1227753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1228755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1229757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1230760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1231
1232
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001233What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1234================================
1235
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001236*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001237
1238Core and builtins
1239-----------------
1240
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001241- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1242 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1243
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001244- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1245 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1246 and cannot be strings).
1247
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001248- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1249 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1250 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1251 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1252
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001253- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1254 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1255 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1256 Python itself.
1257
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001258- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1259 the referenced object, if it has one.
1260
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001261- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1262 the thread started at
1263 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1264
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001265- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1266 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1267 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1268 placed on a list index.
1269
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001270- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1271 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1272 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1273 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1274
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001275- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1276 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1277 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1278 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1279 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1280 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1281 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1282
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001283- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1284 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1285 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1286 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1287 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1288
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001289- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1290 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001291
1292- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1293 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1294 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1295 #693195.)
1296
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001297- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1298 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001299
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001300- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001301 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001302 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1303 interpreter executions, would fail.
1304
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001305- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001306 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001307 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001308
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001309Extension modules
1310-----------------
1311
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001312- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1313 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1314 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1315 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1316
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001317- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1318 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1319
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001320- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1321 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1322 and Greg Chapman.)
1323
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001324- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1325 recursively.
1326
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001327- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001328 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1329 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1330 leaks.
1331
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001332- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1333
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001334- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1335 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1336 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1337 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1338 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1339 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1340 #705836.
1341
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001342- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001343 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1344
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001345- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1346 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1347 See SF bug #692416.
1348
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001349- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1350 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1351
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001352- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1353 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1354 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001355
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001356- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001357 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1358 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1359
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001360- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1361 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1362 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1363 timeouts to work properly.
1364
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001365Library
1366-------
1367
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001368- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1369 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1370 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1371 future release.
1372
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001373- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1374 for querying platform dependent features.
1375
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001376- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001377
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001378- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1379 pickle protocol versions.
1380
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001381- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1382 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1383 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1384
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001385- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1386
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001387- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1388 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1389 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1390 modules.
1391
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001392- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1393 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1394 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1395
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001396- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1397 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1398
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001399- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1400 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1401 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1402
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001403- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001404 MS Office extensions.
1405
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001406- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1407 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1408
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001409- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1410 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1411
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001412- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1413 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1414 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1415 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1416 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1417 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1418
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001419- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1420 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1421 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001422
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001423- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1424 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1425 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1426
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001427- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1428
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001429- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1430 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1431 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1432
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001433Tools/Demos
1434-----------
1435
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001436- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1437 See the module docstring for details.
1438
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001439Build
1440-----
1441
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001442- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1443 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001444
1445C API
1446-----
1447
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001448- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1449
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001450- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1451 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1452 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1453
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001454- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1455 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001456
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001457 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1458 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1459 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001460
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001461- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001462 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1463
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001464- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1465 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1466 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001467
1468New platforms
1469-------------
1470
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001471None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001472
1473Tests
1474-----
1475
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001476- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1477 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001478
1479Windows
1480-------
1481
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001482- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1483 function.
1484
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001485- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1486 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001487
1488Mac
1489---
1490
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001491- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1492 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001493
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001494- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1495 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001496
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001497- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1498 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1499 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001500
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001501- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001502 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1503 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001504
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001505- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1506 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001507
1508
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001509What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1510=================================
1511
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001512*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001513
1514Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001515-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001516
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001517- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1518 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1519 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1520
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001521- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1522 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1523 (SF patch #664376.)
1524
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001525- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1526 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1527 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1528 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1529 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1530 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001531 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001532
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001533- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1534 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1535 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1536 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001537 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001538
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001539- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1540 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1541 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1542 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1543 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1544 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1545 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1546 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1547 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1548 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1549 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1550
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001551- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1552 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1553 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1554 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1555 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1556 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1557
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001558- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1559 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1560
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001561- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1562 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1563 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1564 case.)
1565
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001566- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1567 passed as unicode strings.
1568
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001569- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1570 See SF bug #683467.
1571
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001572- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1573 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1574
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001575- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1576
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001577- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1578
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001579- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1580 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1581 arguments.
1582
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001583- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1584 See SF bug #667147.
1585
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001586- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001587 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001588 See SF bug #676155.
1589
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001590- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001591 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001592 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1593 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1594 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1595 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1596 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1597 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001598
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001599Extension modules
1600-----------------
1601
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001602- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1603 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1604 tp_as_number pointer.
1605
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001606- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1607 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1608 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1609 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1610 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1611
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001612- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1613
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001614- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1615
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001616- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001617 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001618 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1619 patch #678531.)
1620
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001621- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1622 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1623
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001624- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1625 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1626
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001627- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1628
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001629- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1630 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1631 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1632
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001633- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1634
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001635- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1636 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1637
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001638- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001639
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001640- datetime changes:
1641
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001642 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1643
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001644 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1645 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1646 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1647 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1648 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1649 now.
1650
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001651 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001652 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1653 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001654
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001655 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001656 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001657 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1658 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1659 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1660 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001661
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001662 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1663 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1664 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001665 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1666
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001667 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1668 by a later example coded by Guido.
1669
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001670 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001671 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1672 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1673 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001674 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1675 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1676
1677 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1678 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1679 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1680 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1681 tzinfo subclass instance.
1682
1683 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1684 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1685 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1686 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1687 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1688 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1689 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1690 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001691
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001692 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1693 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1694 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1695 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1696 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001697 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1698
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001699 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001700
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001701 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1702 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1703 as a naive datetime object.
1704
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001705 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1706 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1707 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1708
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001709 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1710 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1711 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1712 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1713 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1714 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1715 comparison.
1716
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001717 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1718 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1719 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1720 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001721 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001722
1723 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001724
1725 and ::
1726
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001727 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1728
1729 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1730 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1731 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1732 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1733
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001734 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1735 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1736 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1737 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1738 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1739
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001740 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1741 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001742 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1743 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001744
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001745Library
1746-------
1747
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001748- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1749 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1750
1751- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1752 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1753 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1754 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1755 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1756 See PEP 307 for details.
1757
1758- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1759 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1760
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001761- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1762 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001763 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001764 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1765 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001766 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001767
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001768- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1769 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1770
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001771- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1772 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1773 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1774
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001775- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1776
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001777- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1778 exception.
1779
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001780- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1781 class.
1782
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001783- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1784 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1785 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1786
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001787- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1788 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1789
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001790- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001791 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1792 See SF bug #659228.
1793
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001794- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1795 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1796 See SF patch #651082.
1797
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001798- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001799
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001800- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1801 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1802
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001803- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001804 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001805
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001806- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1807 DOS paths from other platforms.
1808
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001809Tools/Demos
1810-----------
1811
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001812- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1813 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1814 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1815 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1816 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1817 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1818 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1819 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1820 example:
1821
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001822 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1823 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001824
1825 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1826
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001827
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001828Build
1829-----
1830
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001831- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1832 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1833 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001834 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1835
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001836 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1837
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001838- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1839 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1840 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1841 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1842 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1843 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1844 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1845 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1846 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1847
1848- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1849 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1850 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1851 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1852
1853- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1854 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1855
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001856C API
1857-----
1858
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001859- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1860 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001861
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001862- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1863 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1864 tp_as_number pointer.
1865
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001866- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1867 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1868 (SF #681367)
1869
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001870- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1871 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1872 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1873 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001874
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001875Tests
1876-----
1877
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001878- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001879 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1880 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1881 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1882 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1883 pydoc.)
1884
1885- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1886
1887- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001888
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001889Windows
1890-------
1891
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001892- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1893 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1894 time).
1895
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001896- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1897 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1898
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001899- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1900 release without strong cryptography.
1901
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001902- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001903 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001904
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001905- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1906 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1907
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001908Mac
1909---
1910
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001911- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1912 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001913
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001914- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1915 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1916 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001917
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001918- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1919 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001920
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001921- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1922 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1923 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1924 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001925
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001926- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001927 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1928 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1929 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001930
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001931
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001932What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001933=================================
1934
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001935*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001936
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001937Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001938--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001939
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001940- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1941
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001942- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1943 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001944 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001945 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001946 a different meaning than before.
1947
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001948- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001949 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001950 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001951
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001952- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001953 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001954 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001955
1956- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1957 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1958 and deallocation.
1959
1960- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1961 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1962
1963- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1964 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1965 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1966 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1967 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1968
1969- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1970 now detected by the garbage collector.
1971
1972- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1973 [SF bug 519621]
1974
1975- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1976 identifier.
1977
1978- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1979 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1980 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1981 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1982 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1983 [SF bug 563060]
1984
1985- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1986 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1987 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1988 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1989 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1990
1991- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1992 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1993 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1994
1995- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1996
1997- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1998 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1999 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2000 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2001 state of the slots would be lost.)
2002
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002003Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002004-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002005
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002006- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002007 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2008 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2009 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2010 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002011 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2012 Jython 2.1.
2013
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002014- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002015 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002016 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2017 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2018 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2019 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2020 these, see PEP 302.
2021
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002022- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2023 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2024 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2025
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002026- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2027 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2028 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2029
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002030- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2031 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2032 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2033
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002034- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2035 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2036 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2037 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2038 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2039 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2040 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2041 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2042 releases or implementations.
2043
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002044- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002045 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2046 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002047
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002048- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2049 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2050
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002051- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2052 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2053 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2054
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002055- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2056 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2057
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002058- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2059 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002060 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2061 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002062
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002063- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2064 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2065 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2066 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2067 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2068
2069 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2070 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2071 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2072 pattern.
2073
2074 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2075 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2076 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2077 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2078
2079 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2080 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2081 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2082 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2083 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2084 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2085
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002086- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2087 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2088 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2089 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2090 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2091 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2092 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2093 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002094
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002095- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2096 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2097 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2098 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2099 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002100 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2101 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2102 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2103 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2104 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2105 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2106 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002107
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002108- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2109 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2110
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002111- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2112 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2113 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2114 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2115 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2116 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2117 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2118 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2119 to Zack Weinberg!
2120
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002121- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2122 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2123 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2124 type. This has been fixed now.
2125
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002126- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2127 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2128 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2129
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002130- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2131 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2132 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2133 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2134 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2135 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2136 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2137 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002138 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002139
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002140- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2141 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2142 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002143
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002144- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2145 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2146 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2147 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2148 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2149 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2150 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2151 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002152 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002153 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2154 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2155
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002156- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2157 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2158 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2159 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2160 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2161 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2162 this.)
2163
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002164- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2165 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002166 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002167 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002168 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2169 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002170 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2171 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002172
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002173- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2174 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2175 currently running.
2176
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002177- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2178 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2179 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2180 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2181
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002182- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2183 as directory names.
2184
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002185- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2186 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2187
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002188- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2189 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2190
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002191- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002192 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2193 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002194
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002195- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2196 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2197 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2198 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2199 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2200
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002201- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2202 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2203 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2204 removed.
2205
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002206- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2207 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2208 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2209
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002210- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2211 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2212 to __debug__.
2213
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002214- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2215 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2216 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2217
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002218- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2219 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2220 deprecated now.
2221
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002222- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2223 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2224 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002225
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002226- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2227 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2228 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2229 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2230 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002231
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002232- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2233 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2234
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002235- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2236 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2237 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002238 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002239 is backward compatible.
2240
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002241- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2242 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2243 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2244 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2245 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2246
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002247- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2248 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2249 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2250 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2251 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2252 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002253
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002254- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2255 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2256
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002257- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2258 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2259
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002260- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2261 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2262 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2263 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2264 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2265
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002266- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2267 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2268 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2269
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002270- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002271 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2272
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002273- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2274 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2275 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002276
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002277- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2278 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2279
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002280- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2281 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2282 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2283
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002284- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2285
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002286Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002287-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002288
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002289- Added three operators to the operator module:
2290 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2291 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2292 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2293
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002294- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2295
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002296- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2297 archives.
2298
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002299- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2300 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2301 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2302
2303 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2304
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002305- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2306 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2307 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002308 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002309
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002310- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2311 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2312 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2313 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002314 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2315 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2316 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2317 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002318
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002319- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2320 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002321
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002322- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2323
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002324- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2325 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2326
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002327- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2328 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2329 supported.
2330
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002331- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2332
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002333- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2334 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002335
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002336- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2337 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2338
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002339- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2340
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002341- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2342 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2343
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002344- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2345 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2346 functions but callable type objects.
2347
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002348- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002349 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002350 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002351
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002352- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2353 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002354
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002355- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2356 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002357
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002358- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2359 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2360 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2361 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2362
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002363- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2364 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002365
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002366- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2367 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2368 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2369 and __imul__.
2370
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002371- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002372 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2373 is called.
2374
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002375- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2376 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2377 interpreter was compiled.
2378
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002379- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2380 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2381 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002382 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002383 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2384 1, not 2.
2385
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002386- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2387 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2388 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2389 limit.
2390
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002391- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2392 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2393 bug #623464.
2394
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002395- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2396 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2397 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2398 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2399
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002400Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002401-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002402
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002403- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2404
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002405- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2406 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2407 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2408 with Python 2.3a2.
2409
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002410- os.path exposes getctime.
2411
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002412- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002413 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002414 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002415 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002416 unit tests of floating point results.
2417
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002418- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2419 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2420 has been increased.
2421
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002422- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2423 executed.
2424
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002425- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2426 postinstallation script.
2427
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002428- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2429 test the current module.
2430
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002431- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002432 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2433 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2434 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2435 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2436
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002437- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002438 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002439 Ward's Optik package.
2440
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002441- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2442 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2443 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2444 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2445
2446- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2447 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002448 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002449
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002450- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2451 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2452 shelf are binary pickles.
2453
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002454- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2455 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2456
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002457- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2458 modules are iterators now.
2459
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002460- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2461 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2462 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2463 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2464 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2465 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002466
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002467- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2468 with their entity value.
2469
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002470- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2471
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002472- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2473 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002474
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002475- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2476 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002477 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002478
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002479- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2480 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2481 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2482 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2483 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2484 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2485 main():
2486
2487 import locale
2488 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2489
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002490- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2491 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2492
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002493- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2494 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2495 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2496 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2497 to the new standard.
2498
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002499- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2500 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2501 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2502 an extension to the database.
2503
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002504- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2505 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2506 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2507 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002508 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002509
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002510- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002511 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002512
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002513- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2514 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2515 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2516 bounded integers.
2517
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002518- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2519 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2520 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2521 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2522 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2523 in existence.
2524
2525 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2526 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2527 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2528 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2529 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2530 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2531
2532 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2533 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2534 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2535 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2536
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002537- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2538 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2539 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2540
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002541- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2542
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002543- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2544 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2545 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2546 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2547
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002548- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2549 argument.
2550
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002551- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2552 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2553 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2554 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2555 [SF patch 560794].
2556
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002557- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2558 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2559 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002560 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2561 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2562 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002563
2564- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2565 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002566
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002567- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2568 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2569 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2570 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002571
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002572- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2573 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2574 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2575 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2576 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2577
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002578- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002579
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002580- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2581
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002582- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2583 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2584 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2585 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2586 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2587 identical to None.
2588
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002589- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2590 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2591 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2592 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2593 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2594 results now.
2595
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002596- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2597 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2598
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002599- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2600 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2601 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2602 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2603 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2604 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2605 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2606 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2607
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002608- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2609
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002610- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2611 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2612
2613- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2614 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2615 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2616 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2617 and other systems.
2618
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002619- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2620 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2621 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2622 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 +00002623 work well with these.
2624
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002625- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2626
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002627- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002628 connections.
2629
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002630- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2631 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2632 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2633
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002634- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2635 sets
2636
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002637- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2638 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2639 name.
2640
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002641- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2642 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2643 passed in.
2644
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002645- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002646 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002647 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2648 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002649
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002650- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2651
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002652- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2653
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002654- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2655 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2656 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2657
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002658- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2659 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2660 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2661 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002662 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002663
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002664- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002665 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002666 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002667
2668- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2669 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2670 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2671
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002672- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002673 the value of its expression argument.
2674
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002675- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2676 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2677 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2678
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002679- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2680 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2681 skipstone browser was included.
2682
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002683- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2684 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2685
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002686Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002687-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002688
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002689- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2690 names in addition to accepting file names.
2691
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002692- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2693 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2694 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2695 still used and useful.)
2696
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002697- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2698 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2699 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2700 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002701
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002702- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2703 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2704 the generated binary.
2705
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002706Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002707-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002708
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002709- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2710
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002711- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2712 except in the hands of experts.
2713
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002714- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002715 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2716 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2717 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002718
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002719- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2720 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2721 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2722 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2723 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2724 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2725 builds.
2726
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002727- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2728 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2729 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2730 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2731 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2732 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2733 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2734 new type.
2735
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002736- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002737
2738 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2739 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2740 positive infinities.
2741
2742 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2743 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2744 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2745 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2746 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2747 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2748 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2749
2750 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2751
2752 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2753
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002754- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2755 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2756 size of the executable.
2757
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002758- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2759 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2760 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2761 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002762
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002763- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2764
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002765- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2766 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2767 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002768
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002769- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2770 well as Unix.
2771
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002772- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2773 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2774 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2775 modules in the README file for details.
2776
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002777C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002778-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002779
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002780- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2781 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002782 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002783 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002784 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002785
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002786- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2787 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2788 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2789 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2790 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2791 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002792 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002793 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2794 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2795 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2796 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2797 aligned.)
2798
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002799- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2800 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2801 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2802
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002803- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2804 level.
2805
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002806- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2807 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2808 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2809 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2810 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2811
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002812- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2813 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2814 code.
2815
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002816- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2817 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2818 adjusting for negative indices.
2819
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002820- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2821 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2822 object.
2823
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002824- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2825 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2826 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2827
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002828- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2829 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002830
2831- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2832
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002833- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2834 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2835 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2836 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2837
2838- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2839
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002840- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002841
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002842- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002843 without going through the buffer API.
2844
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002845- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002846
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002847- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2848 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2849 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2850 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2851
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002852- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2853 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2854
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002855- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002856 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2857
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002858New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002859-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002860
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002861- OpenVMS is now supported.
2862
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002863- AtheOS is now supported.
2864
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002865- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2866
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002867- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2868
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002869Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002870-----
2871
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002872- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2873 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2874 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002875
2876Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002877-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002878
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002879- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2880 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2881 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2882 bugs.
2883 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002884 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002885 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2886 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002887 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002888
2889- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002890 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002891
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002892- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2893 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2894
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002895- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2896 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002897 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002898 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2899
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002900- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2901 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2902 use files" uninstall option).
2903
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002904- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2905
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002906- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2907 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2908
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002909- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2910 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2911 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2912
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002913- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2914 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2915 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2916 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2917 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002918 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2919 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2920 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002921
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002922- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002923 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002924 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2925 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2926 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2927 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2928 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2929 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2930 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2931 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2932 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2933 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2934 work around.
2935
2936- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2937 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2938 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2939 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2940 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2941 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2942 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2943 specified with O_CREAT too).
2944
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002945Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002946----
2947
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002948- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002949
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002950- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2951 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2952 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2953
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002954- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2955 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2956 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2957
2958- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2959 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2960 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2961 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2962 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2963 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2964 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2965 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002966
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002967- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2968 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2969 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002970
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002971- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2972 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2973 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2974 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2975 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002976
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002977- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2978 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2979 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002980
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002981- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2982 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002983
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002984- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2985 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2986 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2987 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2988 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002989
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002990- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2991 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2992 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2993
2994- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2995 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2996 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002997
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002998- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2999 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3000 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3001 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003002 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003003
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003004- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3005 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003006
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003007- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3008 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003009
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003010- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003011 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003012 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3013 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003014
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003015
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003016What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003017===============================
3018
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003019*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3020
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003021Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003022--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003023
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003024- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3025 with a custom metaclass.
3026
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003027Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003028-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003029
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003030- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3031 are proxies.
3032
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003033Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003034-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003035
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003036- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3037 very short strings.
3038
3039- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3040 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3041 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3042 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3043 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3044
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003045Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003046-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003047
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003048- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3049 close or delete time).
3050
3051- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3052 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3053
3054- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3055
3056- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003057 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003058
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003059Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003060-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003061
3062Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003063-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003064
3065C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003066-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003067
3068New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003069-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003070
3071Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003072-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003073
3074Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003075-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003076
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003077- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3078
3079- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3080 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3081
3082- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3083 deleted at process exit time.
3084
3085- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3086 in backslash.
3087
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003088Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003089----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003090
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003091- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3092 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3093 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3094
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003095
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003096What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003097===========================
3098
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003099*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3100
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003101Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003102--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003103
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003104- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3105 been extensively updated. See
3106
3107 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3108
3109 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3110
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003111- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3112 deleted!
3113
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003114- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3115 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3116 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3117 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3118 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3119
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003120- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3121
3122 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3123 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3124
3125 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3126 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3127 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3128 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3129 supported anyway.
3130
3131 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3132 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3133
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003134- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3135 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3136 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3137 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3138 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003139
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003140- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3141 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3142 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3143
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003144Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003145-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003146
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003147- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3148 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3149 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3150 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3151 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3152 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003153 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3154 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3155 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3156 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003157
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003158- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3159 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3160 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3161
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003162Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003163-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003164
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003165- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3166
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003167Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003168-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003169
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003170- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3171 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3172 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3173 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3174 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3175 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3176
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003177- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3178
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003179- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3180
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003181- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3182
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003183- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3184 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3185 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3186
3187- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3188
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003189Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003190-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003191
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003192- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3193 off a search on Google.
3194
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003195Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003196-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003197
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003198- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3199 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3200 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3201 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3202 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3203 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3204 other platforms should do likewise.
3205
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003206- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3207 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3208 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3209
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003210C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003211-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003212
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003213- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3214 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3215 producing key-value pairs.
3216
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003217- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003218 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003219 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3220 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3221 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3222 previously went unchallenged.
3223
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003224New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003226
3227Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003228-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003229
3230Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003232
3233Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003235
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003236- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3237 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003238
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003239- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3240 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3241 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3242 home.
3243
3244
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003245What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003246===========================
3247
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003248*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3249
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003250Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003251--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003252
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003253- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3254 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003255
3256 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003257 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003258
3259 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3260 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003261 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003262 This needs to be documented.
3263
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003264- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3265 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3266
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003267- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3268 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3269 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3270
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003271- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3272 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3273
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003274- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3275 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3276 class forbids it).
3277
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003278- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3279 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3280 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3281
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003282- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3283
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003284Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003285-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003286
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003287- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3288 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003289 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003290
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003291- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3292 (like 1 + '').
3293
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003294Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003296
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003297- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3298 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3299 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3300 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003301 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003302 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3303
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003304- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3305 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3306 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3307 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3308
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003309- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3310 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003311 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3312 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3313 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003314
3315- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3316 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003317
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003318- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3319 bytes on its input.
3320
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003321Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003322-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003323
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003324- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003325 convenience function.
3326
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003327- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3328 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3329 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003330 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3331 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3332 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3333 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3334 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3335 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003336
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003337- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3338 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3339 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3340 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3341
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003342- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3343 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3344 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3345
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003346- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3347 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3348 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3349 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3350
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003351- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3352 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003353 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003354 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3355 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3356 new -l and -e options.
3357
3358- statcache is now deprecated.
3359
3360- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3361 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003362 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003363 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3364 time properly taken into account.
3365
3366- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3367 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3368 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3369 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3370
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003371Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003372-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003373
3374Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003375-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003376
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003377- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3378 is built with libdb3 if available.
3379
3380- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3381
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003382C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003384
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003385- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3386 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3387 PySequence_Size().
3388
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003389- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3390
3391- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3392 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3393 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3394
3395- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3396 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3397
3398- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3399 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3400
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003401New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003403
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003404- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3405 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3406
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003407- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3408 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3409
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003410- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3411
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003412Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003414
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003415- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3416 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3417
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003418Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003419-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003420
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003421Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003423
3424- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3425 removed completely in the next release.
3426
3427- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3428 OSX.
3429
3430- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3431 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3432
3433- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3434
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003435
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003436What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003437===========================
3438
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003439*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3440
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003441Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003442--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003443
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003444- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003445 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003446 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003447 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3448 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003449 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3450 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003451 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3452 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003453
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003454- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3455 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3456
3457- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3458 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3459
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003460Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003462
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003463- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3464 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3465 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3466 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3467 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3468 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3469 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3470 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3471
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003472- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3473 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3474 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3475 example).
3476
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003477- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003478 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003479 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003480 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003481
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003482- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3483 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3484 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003485 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003486
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003487- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3488 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3489 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3490 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3491 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3492 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3493
3494 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3495
3496 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3497
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003498Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003500
3501- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3502
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003503- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3504
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003505- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3506 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003507
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003508- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3509 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3510 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3511 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3512 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3513 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003514 attributes.
3515
3516- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3517 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3518 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003519
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003520- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3521 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3522 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003523
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003524- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3525 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3526 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003527 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3528 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3529
3530- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3531 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003532
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003533Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003534-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003535
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003536- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3537 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3538
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003539- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3540 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3541 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3542 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3543
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003544- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3545 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3546 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3547 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3548
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003549 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3550 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3551 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3552 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3553 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3554 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3555 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3556 without losing information).
3557
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003558- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003559 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3560 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3561 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3562 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3563 module).
3564
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003565 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003566 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3567 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3568 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3569 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003570
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003571- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003572 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3573 encoding.
3574
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003575- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3576 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3577
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003579 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3580
3581- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3582 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3583 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3584 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3585
3586- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3587
3588- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3589 ON, and OFF.
3590
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003591- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3592 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3593
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003594Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003595-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003596
3597- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3598 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3599 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003600
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003601- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3602 been added: -X and -E.
3603
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003604Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003606
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003607- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3608 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3609
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003610C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003612
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003613- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3614 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3615 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3616 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3617 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3618
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003619- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3620 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3621 as long) arguments.
3622
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003623- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3624 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3625 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3626 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3627 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3628 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3629
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003630- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3631 input.
3632
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003633New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003634-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003635
3636Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003637-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003638
3639Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003640-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003641
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003642- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3643 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3644 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3645
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003646- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3647 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3648 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003649 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003650
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003651 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3652 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3653 import signal
3654 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003655
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003656 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003657 while 1:
3658 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003660 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3661 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3662 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3663 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003664
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003665
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003666What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3667===========================
3668
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003669*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3670
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003671Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003672--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003673
3674- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3675 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3676 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3677
3678- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3679 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3680 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3681 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3682 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3683 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3684 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003685
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003686- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003687 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003688 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3689 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3690 associate a docstring with a property.
3691
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003692- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3693 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3694 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3695 other built-in object types.
3696
3697- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3698 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3699 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3700 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3701 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3702
3703- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3704 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3705
3706- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3707 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003708 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003709 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3710 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3711 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3712 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3713 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3714
3715- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3716 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3717 class.
3718
3719- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3720 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3721 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3722 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3723
3724- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3725 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3726 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3727 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3728
3729- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3730 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3731
3732- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3733 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3734 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3735 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3736 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003737 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003738 with the same value as s.
3739
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003740- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3741
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003742Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003744
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003745- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3746
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003747- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3748 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3749 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3750 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3751 objects.
3752
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003753- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3754 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003755 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3756 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3757
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003758- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3759 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3760 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3761
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003762Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003764
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003765- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3766 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3767 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3768 by the instances.
3769
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003770- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3771 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3772 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3773
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003774- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3775 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3776 before the entire comparison is complete.
3777
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003778- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3779 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3780 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3781
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003782- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3783 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3784 getwriter().
3785
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003786- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3787 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3788
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003789- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003790 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3791 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3792
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003793- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3794 iterable object.
3795
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003796- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3797 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003798
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003799- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3800 authentication.
3801
3802- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3803 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003804
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003805- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003806 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3807 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3808 a sample driver.)
3809
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003810Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003812
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003813- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3814 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3815 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3816 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3817 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3818 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3819 kernel has large file support.
3820
3821- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3822 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3823 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3824 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3825 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3826
3827- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3828 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3829 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3830
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003831C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003832-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003833
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003834- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3835 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3836
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003837New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003839
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003840- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3841 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3842
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003843Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003844-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003845
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003846- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3847 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3848 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3849 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3850 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3851
3852- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3853 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3854 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3855 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3856
3857- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3858 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3859
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003860Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003862
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003863- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003864 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3865 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003866
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003867
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003868What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3869===========================
3870
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3872
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003873Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003874----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003875
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003876- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3877 big to represent as a C double.
3878
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003879- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3880 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3881 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3882 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3883 restriction).
3884
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003885- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3886 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3887 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3888 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3889 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3890
3891 >>> dir([])
3892 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3893 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3894 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3895 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3896 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3897 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3898 'reverse', 'sort']
3899
3900 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3901
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003902- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003903 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3904 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3905 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3906 OverflowError exception.
3907
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003908- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003909 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003910 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3911 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3912 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3913 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3914 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003915 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003916 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3917 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3918
3919 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3920 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3921 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3922 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003923
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003924- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003925 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3926 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3927 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3928 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3929 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3930 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3931 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3932 once it is created.
3933
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003934- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3935 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3936 (key, value) pairs.
3937
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003938- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003939 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3940 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3941
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003942- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3943 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3944 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3945 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3946 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003947
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003948- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003949 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3950 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3951
3952 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3953
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003954- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003955 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3956
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003957Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003959
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003960- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003961 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3962 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003963
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003964- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3965 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3966 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3967 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3968 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3969 in this area anymore).
3970
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003971- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3972 threading.Timer.
3973
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003974- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3975 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3976
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003977- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003978 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3979
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003980- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003981 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3982 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3983 converted to Python longs.
3984
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003985- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003986 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3987
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003988- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3989 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3990 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3991
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003992Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003993-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003994
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003995- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3996 division operators as per PEP 238.
3997
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003998Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003999-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004000
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004001- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4002 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4003 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4004 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4005
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004006C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004008
4009- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004010
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004011- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4012 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004013 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004014
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004015 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4016 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004017 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004019
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004020- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004021 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4022 module:
4023
4024 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004025
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004026 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4027 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004028
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004029 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4030 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004031
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004032 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4033
4034 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4035
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004036- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004037 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4038 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4039 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004040
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004041New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004042-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004043
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004044- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4045 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4046 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4047 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4048 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004049
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004050Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004051-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004052
4053Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004055
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004056- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4057 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4058 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4059 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004060 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4061 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4062 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4063 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4064 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004065
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004066- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004067 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4068
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004069
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004070What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4071===========================
4072
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004073*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4074
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004075Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004077
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004078- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4079 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4080
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004081- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4082 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4083 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004084
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004085- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4086 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4087 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4088 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004089
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004090- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4091
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004093
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004094Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004095-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004096
4097- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004098 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004099 the module docstring for details.
4100
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004101Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004102-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004103
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004104- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004105 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4106 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4107 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004108
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004109- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4110 Nick Mathewson.
4111
4112Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004113----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004114
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004115- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4116 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4117 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4118 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4119 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4120 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4121 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4122 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4123
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004124- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4125 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4126 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4127 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4128
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004129- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4130 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4131 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4132 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4133 come a long way).
4134
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004135- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4136 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4137 write filters for these warnings).
4138
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004139- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4140 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4141 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4142 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4143 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4144
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004145- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4146 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4147 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4148 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4149 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4150 older distribution.
4151
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004152Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004154
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004155- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4156 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004157 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004158
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004159- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4160 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4161 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4162
4163- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4164
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004165- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4166
4167- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4168
4169- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4170
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004171- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004172
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004173- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4174
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004175New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004177
4178C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004180
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004181- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4182 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4183 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4184 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4185 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4186 against buffer overruns.
4187
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004188- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004189 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4190 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004191 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4192 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4193 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4194
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004195- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4196 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4197 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4198 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4199 deprecated.
4200
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004201Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004203
4204- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4205 relevant is found.
4206
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004207
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004208What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004209===========================
4210
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4212
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004213Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004215
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004216- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4217 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4218 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4219 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4220 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4221 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4222 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4223 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004224 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004225 repaired.
4226
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004227- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004228 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004229 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4230 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4231 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4232 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4233 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4234 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4235 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4236 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4237
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004238- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4239 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4240 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4241 leading BMO character).
4242
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004243- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4244 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4245 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4246
4247 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4248 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4249 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004250
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004251 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4252 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4253 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4254 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4255 for various simple to use conversions.
4256
4257 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4258 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4259
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4261 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4262 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4263 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4264 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4265 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4266 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4267 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4268 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4269 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4270 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4271 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4272 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4273 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4274 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004275
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004276- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4277 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4278 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004279 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004280 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004281
4282 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004283 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4284 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4285 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4286 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4287 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004288 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4289 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004290
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004291 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4292 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4293 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004294 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004295
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004296- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4297 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4298 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4299 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4300 floating arithmetic,
4301
4302 x = 9007199254740992.0
4303 print long(x)
4304
4305 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4306 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4307 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4308 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4309 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4310 functions are of good quality).
4311
4312 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4313 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4314 algorithms to break.
4315
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004316- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4317 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4318 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4319 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4320 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4321 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4322 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4323 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4324 order.
4325
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004326- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4327 operation along the most common code paths.
4328
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004329- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4330 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4331
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004332- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4333 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4334 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4335 {}.update(UserDict())
4336
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004337- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4338 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4339 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4340 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4341 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4342 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4343 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4344 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4345
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004346- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004347 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004348
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004349 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004350 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4351 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004352 join() method of strings
4353 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004354 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4355 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004357 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004358
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004359- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4360 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4361
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004362- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4363 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4364
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004365- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4366 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4367 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4368 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4369
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004370- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4371 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004372 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004373 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4374 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004375
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004376- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4377
4378
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004379Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004380-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004381
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004382- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004383 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004384 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4385 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4386
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004387- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4388 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4389
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004390- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4391 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4392 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4393 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4394
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004395- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4396 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4397 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4398
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004399- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4400
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004401- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4402
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004403- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4404 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4405 that are still imported into string.py).
4406
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004407- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4408
4409- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4410 Now it does.
4411
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004412- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4413
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004414- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4415 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4416 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4417 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4418 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004419 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4420 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004421
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004422- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4423 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4424 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4425 'help(object)'.
4426
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004427Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004429
4430- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004431 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004432 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4433 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4434
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004435- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004436 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4437 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004438
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004439C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004440-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004441
4442- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4443 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004444
4445----
4446
4447**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**