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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
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Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
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
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000363- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects will now print out a traceback even
364 when an exception is raised in a thread during interpreter shutdown.
365
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000366- Added Decimal.py per PEP 327.
367
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000368- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
369 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000370
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000371- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
372 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
373
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000374- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
375
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000376- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000377 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000378
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000379- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
380 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
381
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000382- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
383
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000384- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
385 on cygwin and mingw32.
386
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000387- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
388
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000389- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
390 module.
391
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000392- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
393 installation scheme for all platforms.
394
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000395- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000396 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000397
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000398- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
399 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
400 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
401
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000402- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
403 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
404 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
405
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000406- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
407
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000408- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
409
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000410- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
411 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
412
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000413- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
414 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
415 type pattern with the same value exists.
416
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000417- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
418 when run from the command prompt).
419
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000420- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
421 not taken into consideration when caching value.
422
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000423- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
424 default sort).
425
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000426- Added global runctx function to profile module
427
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000428- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
429
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000430- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
431
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000432- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
433
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000434- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
435 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
436 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
437 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
438 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
439 accordingly.
440
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000441- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
442 decoding standards.
443
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000444- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
445 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
446 called for all requests.
447
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000448- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
449 they are passed to the compiler.
450
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000451- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
452 indent, width and depth.
453
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000454- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
455 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
456
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000457- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
458 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
459
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000460- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
461
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000462- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
463
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000464- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
465
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000466- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
467 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
468
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000469- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000470 for better performance.
471
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000472- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000473
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000474- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
475 a string).
476
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000477- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
478
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000479- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
480
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000481- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
482
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000483- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
484
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000485- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
486 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
487 list of fieldnames.
488
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000489- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
490 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
491
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000492- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
493
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000494- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
495 empty lists.
496
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000497- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
498 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
499 and shelves.
500
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000501- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
502 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
503
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000504- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000505 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
506 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000507
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000508- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
509 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000510 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000511
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000512- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000513 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
514 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
515
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000516- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
517 and removed in Py2.4.
518
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000519- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
520
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000521- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
522
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000523Tools/Demos
524-----------
525
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000526- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
527 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
528
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000529- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
530
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000531- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
532 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
533 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
534 destination in situations where both files are given.
535
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000536- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
537 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
538 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
539 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
540
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000541- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
542
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000543- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
544 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
545 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
546 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
547 now.
548
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000549- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
550 in effect
551
552- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
553 C-c C-h
554
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000555- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
556 -d option was given.
557
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000558Build
559-----
560
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000561- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
562 build under OS X.
563
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000564- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
565 --enable-profiling.
566
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000567- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
568 is configured --with-tsc.
569
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000570- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
571 on AMD64.
572
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000573- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
574 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
575
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000576- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
577 removed.
578
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000579- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
580 supported (see PEP 11).
581
582- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
583
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000584- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
585
586- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
587 (see PEP 11).
588
589- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
590 sizeof(char) must be 1.
591
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000592C API
593-----
594
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000595- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
596 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
597 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
598
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000599- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
600 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
601 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
602 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
603
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000604- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
605 generator objects.
606
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000607- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
608 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000609 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
610 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000611
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000612- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
613 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
614
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000615- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
616 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
617 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
618 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
619 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
620
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000621- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
622 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
623 about 10% faster.
624
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000625- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
626 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
627
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000628- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
629 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
630 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
631 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
632
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000633New platforms
634-------------
635
636Tests
637-----
638
639Windows
640-------
641
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000642- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
643 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
644 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
645 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
646
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000647- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
648 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
649 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
650
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000651Mac
652----
653
654
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000655What's New in Python 2.3 final?
656===============================
657
658*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
659
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000660IDLE
661----
662
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000663- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
664 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
665 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
666 context-menu actions.
667
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000668- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
669 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
670 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
671 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
672 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
673 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
674 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
675 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
676 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
677
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000678
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000679What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
680=============================================
681
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000682*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000683
684Core and builtins
685-----------------
686
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000687- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000688 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000689 comment at the end are still unsupported.
690
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000691Extension modules
692-----------------
693
694- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
695 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
696 than once. This has been fixed.
697
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000698- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
699 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
700 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
701 call.
702
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000703- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
704
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000705Library
706-------
707
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000708- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
709 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
710
711- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
712 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
713 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
714 restored.
715
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000716IDLE
717----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000718
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000719- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000720
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000721Build
722-----
723
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000724- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
725 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
726
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000727C API
728-----
729
730Windows
731-------
732
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000733- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
734 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
735
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000736- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
737
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000738Mac
739---
740
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000741- Various fixes to pimp.
742
743- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
744
745- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
746 more problems than it solves.
747
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000748
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000749What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
750=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000751
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000752*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
753
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000754Core and builtins
755-----------------
756
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000757- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
758 by sys.setcheckinterval().
759
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000760- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
761 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000762 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000763
764- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
765 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
766 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000767 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000768
769- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
770 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000771
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000772- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
773 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
774 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
775
776- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000777 770247.
778
779- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000780
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000781Extension modules
782-----------------
783
784- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
785 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
786
787- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
788
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000789- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
790
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000791- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
792 contained within the _strptime module.
793
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000794- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
795 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
796
797- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000798 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
799
800- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
801 the find_class attribute, if present.
802
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000803- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000804
805 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
806 (SF bug 763298).
807
808 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000809 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
810 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
811 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000812
813 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
814
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000815Library
816-------
817
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000818- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
819
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000820- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
821 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
822 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
823 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
824 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
825 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
826 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
827 or Tester().
828
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000829- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
830 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
831 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
832 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
833 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
834 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
835 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
836 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
837 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000838
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000839 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000840
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000841- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
842 weren't before was an oversight.
843
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000844- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
845 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
846
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000847- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
848 when there are no lines.
849
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000850- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
851 which could occur with Tk 8.4
852
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000853- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
854 to child processes.
855
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000856- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
857
858- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
859
860- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
861 xmlrpclib.
862
863- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
864 responses.
865
866- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
867 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
868
869- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
870 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
871 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
872
873- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
874 used as patterns.
875
876- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
877 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
878 than Tk 8.3.
879
880- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
881
882- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000883
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000884Tools/Demos
885-----------
886
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000887- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
888
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000889- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
890
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000891- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000892
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000893Build
894-----
895
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000896- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
897
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000898- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
899
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000900- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
901 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000902
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000903- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
904 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
905 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000906
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000907C API
908-----
909
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000910- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
911 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
912
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000913Windows
914-------
915
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000916- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
917 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
918 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
919 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
920 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
921 Python exception ::
922
923 thread.error: can't start new thread
924
925 is raised now.
926
927- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
928 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
929 instead of from DLL teardown.
930
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000931Mac
932---
933
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000934- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000935 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000936 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
937 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
938 the executable in the bundle.
939
940- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000941
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000942- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
943
944- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
945 on Panther.
946
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000947What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
948================================
949
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000950*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000951
952Core and builtins
953-----------------
954
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000955- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
956 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
957 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
958 with the -i option.
959
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000960- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
961 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
962
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000963- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
964 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
965
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000966- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
967 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
968 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
969 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
970 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
971 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
972 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
973 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
974 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
975 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
976 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
977 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
978 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000979
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000980- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
981 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
982 embedded in a lambda expression.
983
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000984- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
985 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
986 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
987 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
988 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
989
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000990- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
991 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
992 matches the restriction on classic classes.
993
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000994- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
995 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
996
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000997- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
998 It's writable again.
999
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001000- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1001 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1002 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001003 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001004
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001005- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1006 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1007 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1008
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001009Extension modules
1010-----------------
1011
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001012- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1013 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1014
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001015- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1016 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1017 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1018 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1019
1020- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1021 collection.
1022
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001023- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1024 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1025 unique within a single program run.
1026
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001027- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1028 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1029
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001030- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1031 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1032
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001033- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1034 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001035
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001036- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1037
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001038- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1039 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1040
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001041- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1042 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1043 for many BSD-derived systems.
1044
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001045
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001046Library
1047-------
1048
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001049- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1050 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1051 primary ones:
1052
1053 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1054 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1055 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1056
1057 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1058 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1059 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1060 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1061 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1062 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1063
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001064- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1065 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1066 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1067 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1068 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1069 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1070 argument.
1071
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001072- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1073 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1074 in the archive.
1075
1076- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1077 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1078
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001079- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1080 569574).
1081
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001082- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1083 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1084 no more.
1085
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001086- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1087 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1088 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1089 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1090 code coverage.
1091
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001092- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1093 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1094 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001095 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1096 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001097
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001098- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1099 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1100 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001101 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001102
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001103- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1104
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001105- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1106 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1107 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1108 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1109
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001110- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1111 handling.
1112
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001113- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1114 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1115
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001116- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1117 in socket.py.
1118
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001119- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1120
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001121- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1122 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1123 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1124 opener with proxy support.
1125
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001126- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1127
1128- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1129
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001130Tools/Demos
1131-----------
1132
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001133- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1134
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001135- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1136
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001137- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1138 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001139
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001140- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1141 files.
1142
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001143Build
1144-----
1145
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001146- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001147 different root directory.
1148
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001149C API
1150-----
1151
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001152- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1153 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1154 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1155 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1156 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1157 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1158 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1159 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1160 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1161 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1162
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001163- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1164 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1165 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1166 from Python.
1167
1168
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001169New platforms
1170-------------
1171
1172None this time.
1173
1174Tests
1175-----
1176
1177- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1178 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1179
1180Windows
1181-------
1182
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001183- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1184
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001185- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1186 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1187 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1188 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1189 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1190 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1191 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1192 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1193 that's what it's for.
1194
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001195Mac
1196---
1197
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001198- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1199 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1200 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1201 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001202- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1203 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1204- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001205
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001206SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1207------------------------------------
1208
1209430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1210598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1211622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1212661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1213683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1214697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1215713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1216724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1217727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1218729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1219730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1220731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1221732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1222733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1223735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1224740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1225744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1226745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1227747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1228749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1229751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1230753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1231755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1232757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1233760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1234
1235
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001236What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1237================================
1238
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001239*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001240
1241Core and builtins
1242-----------------
1243
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001244- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1245 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1246
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001247- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1248 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1249 and cannot be strings).
1250
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001251- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1252 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1253 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1254 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1255
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001256- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1257 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1258 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1259 Python itself.
1260
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001261- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1262 the referenced object, if it has one.
1263
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001264- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1265 the thread started at
1266 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1267
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001268- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1269 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1270 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1271 placed on a list index.
1272
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001273- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1274 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1275 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1276 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1277
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001278- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1279 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1280 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1281 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1282 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1283 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1284 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1285
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001286- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1287 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1288 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1289 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1290 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1291
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001292- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1293 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001294
1295- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1296 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1297 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1298 #693195.)
1299
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001300- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1301 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001302
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001303- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001304 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001305 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1306 interpreter executions, would fail.
1307
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001308- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001309 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001310 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001311
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001312Extension modules
1313-----------------
1314
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001315- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1316 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1317 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1318 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1319
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001320- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1321 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1322
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001323- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1324 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1325 and Greg Chapman.)
1326
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001327- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1328 recursively.
1329
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001330- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001331 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1332 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1333 leaks.
1334
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001335- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1336
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001337- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1338 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1339 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1340 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1341 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1342 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1343 #705836.
1344
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001345- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001346 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1347
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001348- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1349 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1350 See SF bug #692416.
1351
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001352- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1353 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1354
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001355- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1356 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1357 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001358
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001359- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001360 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1361 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1362
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001363- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1364 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1365 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1366 timeouts to work properly.
1367
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001368Library
1369-------
1370
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001371- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1372 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1373 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1374 future release.
1375
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001376- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1377 for querying platform dependent features.
1378
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001379- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001380
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001381- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1382 pickle protocol versions.
1383
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001384- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1385 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1386 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1387
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001388- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1389
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001390- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1391 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1392 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1393 modules.
1394
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001395- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1396 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1397 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1398
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001399- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1400 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1401
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001402- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1403 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1404 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1405
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001406- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001407 MS Office extensions.
1408
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001409- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1410 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1411
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001412- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1413 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1414
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001415- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1416 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1417 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1418 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1419 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1420 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1421
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001422- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1423 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1424 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001425
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001426- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1427 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1428 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1429
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001430- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1431
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001432- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1433 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1434 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1435
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001436Tools/Demos
1437-----------
1438
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001439- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1440 See the module docstring for details.
1441
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001442Build
1443-----
1444
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001445- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1446 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001447
1448C API
1449-----
1450
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001451- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1452
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001453- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1454 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1455 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1456
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001457- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1458 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001459
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001460 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1461 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1462 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001463
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001464- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001465 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1466
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001467- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1468 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1469 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001470
1471New platforms
1472-------------
1473
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001474None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001475
1476Tests
1477-----
1478
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001479- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1480 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001481
1482Windows
1483-------
1484
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001485- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1486 function.
1487
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001488- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1489 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001490
1491Mac
1492---
1493
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001494- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1495 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001496
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001497- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1498 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001499
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001500- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1501 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1502 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001503
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001504- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001505 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1506 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001507
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001508- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1509 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001510
1511
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001512What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1513=================================
1514
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001515*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001516
1517Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001518-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001519
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001520- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1521 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1522 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1523
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001524- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1525 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1526 (SF patch #664376.)
1527
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001528- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1529 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1530 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1531 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1532 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1533 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001534 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001535
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001536- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1537 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1538 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1539 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001540 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001541
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001542- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1543 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1544 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1545 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1546 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1547 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1548 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1549 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1550 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1551 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1552 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1553
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001554- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1555 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1556 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1557 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1558 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1559 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1560
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001561- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1562 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1563
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001564- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1565 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1566 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1567 case.)
1568
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001569- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1570 passed as unicode strings.
1571
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001572- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1573 See SF bug #683467.
1574
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001575- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1576 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1577
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001578- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1579
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001580- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1581
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001582- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1583 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1584 arguments.
1585
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001586- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1587 See SF bug #667147.
1588
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001589- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001590 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001591 See SF bug #676155.
1592
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001593- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001594 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001595 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1596 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1597 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1598 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1599 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1600 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001601
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001602Extension modules
1603-----------------
1604
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001605- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1606 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1607 tp_as_number pointer.
1608
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001609- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1610 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1611 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1612 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1613 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1614
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001615- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1616
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001617- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1618
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001619- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001620 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001621 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1622 patch #678531.)
1623
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001624- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1625 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1626
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001627- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1628 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1629
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001630- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1631
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001632- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1633 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1634 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1635
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001636- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1637
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001638- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1639 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1640
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001641- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001642
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001643- datetime changes:
1644
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001645 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1646
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001647 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1648 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1649 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1650 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1651 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1652 now.
1653
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001654 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001655 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1656 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001657
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001658 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001659 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001660 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1661 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1662 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1663 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001664
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001665 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1666 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1667 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001668 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1669
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001670 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1671 by a later example coded by Guido.
1672
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001673 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001674 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1675 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1676 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001677 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1678 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1679
1680 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1681 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1682 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1683 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1684 tzinfo subclass instance.
1685
1686 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1687 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1688 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1689 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1690 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1691 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1692 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1693 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001694
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001695 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1696 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1697 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1698 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1699 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001700 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1701
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001702 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001703
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001704 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1705 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1706 as a naive datetime object.
1707
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001708 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1709 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1710 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1711
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001712 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1713 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1714 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1715 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1716 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1717 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1718 comparison.
1719
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001720 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1721 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1722 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1723 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001724 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001725
1726 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001727
1728 and ::
1729
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001730 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1731
1732 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1733 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1734 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1735 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1736
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001737 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1738 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1739 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1740 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1741 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1742
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001743 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1744 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001745 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1746 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001747
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001748Library
1749-------
1750
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001751- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1752 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1753
1754- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1755 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1756 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1757 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1758 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1759 See PEP 307 for details.
1760
1761- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1762 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1763
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001764- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1765 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001766 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001767 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1768 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001769 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001770
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001771- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1772 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1773
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001774- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1775 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1776 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1777
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001778- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1779
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001780- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1781 exception.
1782
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001783- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1784 class.
1785
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001786- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1787 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1788 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1789
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001790- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1791 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1792
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001793- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001794 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1795 See SF bug #659228.
1796
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001797- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1798 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1799 See SF patch #651082.
1800
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001801- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001802
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001803- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1804 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1805
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001806- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001807 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001808
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001809- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1810 DOS paths from other platforms.
1811
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001812Tools/Demos
1813-----------
1814
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001815- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1816 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1817 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1818 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1819 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1820 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1821 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1822 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1823 example:
1824
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001825 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1826 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001827
1828 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1829
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001830
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001831Build
1832-----
1833
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001834- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1835 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1836 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001837 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1838
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001839 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1840
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001841- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1842 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1843 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1844 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1845 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1846 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1847 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1848 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1849 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1850
1851- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1852 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1853 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1854 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1855
1856- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1857 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1858
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001859C API
1860-----
1861
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001862- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1863 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001864
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001865- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1866 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1867 tp_as_number pointer.
1868
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001869- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1870 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1871 (SF #681367)
1872
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001873- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1874 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1875 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1876 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001877
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001878Tests
1879-----
1880
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001881- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001882 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1883 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1884 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1885 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1886 pydoc.)
1887
1888- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1889
1890- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001891
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001892Windows
1893-------
1894
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001895- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1896 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1897 time).
1898
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001899- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1900 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1901
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001902- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1903 release without strong cryptography.
1904
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001905- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001906 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001907
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001908- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1909 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1910
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001911Mac
1912---
1913
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001914- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1915 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001916
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001917- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1918 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1919 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001920
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001921- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1922 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001923
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001924- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1925 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1926 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1927 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001928
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001929- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001930 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1931 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1932 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001933
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001934
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001935What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001936=================================
1937
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001938*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001939
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001940Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001941--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001942
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001943- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1944
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001945- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1946 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001947 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001948 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001949 a different meaning than before.
1950
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001951- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001952 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001953 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001954
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001955- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001956 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001957 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001958
1959- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1960 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1961 and deallocation.
1962
1963- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1964 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1965
1966- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1967 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1968 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1969 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1970 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1971
1972- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1973 now detected by the garbage collector.
1974
1975- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1976 [SF bug 519621]
1977
1978- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1979 identifier.
1980
1981- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1982 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1983 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1984 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1985 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1986 [SF bug 563060]
1987
1988- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1989 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1990 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1991 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1992 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1993
1994- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1995 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1996 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1997
1998- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1999
2000- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2001 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2002 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2003 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2004 state of the slots would be lost.)
2005
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002006Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002007-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002008
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002009- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002010 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2011 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2012 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2013 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002014 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2015 Jython 2.1.
2016
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002017- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002018 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002019 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2020 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2021 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2022 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2023 these, see PEP 302.
2024
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002025- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2026 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2027 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2028
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002029- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2030 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2031 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2032
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002033- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2034 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2035 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2036
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002037- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2038 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2039 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2040 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2041 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2042 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2043 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2044 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2045 releases or implementations.
2046
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002047- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002048 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2049 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002050
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002051- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2052 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2053
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002054- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2055 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2056 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2057
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002058- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2059 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2060
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002061- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2062 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002063 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2064 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002065
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002066- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2067 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2068 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2069 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2070 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2071
2072 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2073 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2074 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2075 pattern.
2076
2077 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2078 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2079 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2080 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2081
2082 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2083 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2084 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2085 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2086 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2087 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2088
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002089- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2090 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2091 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2092 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2093 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2094 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2095 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2096 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002097
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002098- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2099 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2100 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2101 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2102 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002103 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2104 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2105 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2106 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2107 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2108 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2109 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002110
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002111- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2112 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2113
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002114- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2115 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2116 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2117 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2118 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2119 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2120 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2121 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2122 to Zack Weinberg!
2123
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002124- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2125 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2126 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2127 type. This has been fixed now.
2128
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002129- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2130 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2131 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2132
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002133- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2134 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2135 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2136 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2137 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2138 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2139 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2140 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002141 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002142
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002143- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2144 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2145 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002146
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002147- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2148 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2149 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2150 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2151 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2152 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2153 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2154 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002155 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002156 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2157 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2158
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002159- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2160 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2161 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2162 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2163 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2164 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2165 this.)
2166
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002167- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2168 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002169 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002170 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002171 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2172 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002173 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2174 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002175
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002176- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2177 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2178 currently running.
2179
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002180- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2181 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2182 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2183 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2184
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002185- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2186 as directory names.
2187
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002188- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2189 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2190
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002191- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2192 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2193
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002194- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002195 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2196 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002197
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002198- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2199 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2200 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2201 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2202 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2203
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002204- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2205 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2206 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2207 removed.
2208
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002209- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2210 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2211 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2212
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002213- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2214 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2215 to __debug__.
2216
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002217- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2218 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2219 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2220
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002221- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2222 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2223 deprecated now.
2224
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002225- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2226 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2227 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002228
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002229- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2230 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2231 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2232 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2233 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002234
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002235- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2236 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2237
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002238- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2239 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2240 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002241 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002242 is backward compatible.
2243
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002244- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2245 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2246 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2247 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2248 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2249
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002250- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2251 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2252 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2253 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2254 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2255 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002256
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002257- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2258 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2259
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002260- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2261 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2262
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002263- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2264 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2265 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2266 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2267 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2268
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002269- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2270 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2271 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2272
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002273- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002274 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2275
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002276- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2277 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2278 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002279
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002280- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2281 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2282
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002283- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2284 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2285 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2286
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002287- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2288
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002289Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002290-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002291
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002292- Added three operators to the operator module:
2293 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2294 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2295 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2296
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002297- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2298
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002299- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2300 archives.
2301
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002302- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2303 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2304 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2305
2306 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2307
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002308- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2309 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2310 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002311 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002312
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002313- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2314 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2315 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2316 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002317 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2318 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2319 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2320 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002321
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002322- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2323 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002324
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002325- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2326
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002327- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2328 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2329
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002330- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2331 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2332 supported.
2333
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002334- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2335
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002336- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2337 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002338
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002339- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2340 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2341
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002342- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2343
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002344- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2345 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2346
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002347- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2348 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2349 functions but callable type objects.
2350
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002351- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002352 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002353 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002354
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002355- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2356 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002357
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002358- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2359 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002360
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002361- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2362 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2363 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2364 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2365
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002366- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2367 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002368
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002369- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2370 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2371 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2372 and __imul__.
2373
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002374- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002375 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2376 is called.
2377
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002378- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2379 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2380 interpreter was compiled.
2381
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002382- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2383 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2384 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002385 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002386 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2387 1, not 2.
2388
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002389- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2390 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2391 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2392 limit.
2393
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002394- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2395 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2396 bug #623464.
2397
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002398- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2399 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2400 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2401 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2402
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002403Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002404-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002405
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002406- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2407
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002408- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2409 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2410 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2411 with Python 2.3a2.
2412
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002413- os.path exposes getctime.
2414
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002415- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002416 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002417 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002418 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002419 unit tests of floating point results.
2420
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002421- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2422 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2423 has been increased.
2424
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002425- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2426 executed.
2427
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002428- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2429 postinstallation script.
2430
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002431- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2432 test the current module.
2433
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002434- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002435 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2436 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2437 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2438 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2439
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002440- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002441 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002442 Ward's Optik package.
2443
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002444- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2445 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2446 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2447 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2448
2449- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2450 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002451 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002452
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002453- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2454 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2455 shelf are binary pickles.
2456
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002457- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2458 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2459
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002460- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2461 modules are iterators now.
2462
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002463- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2464 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2465 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2466 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2467 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2468 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002469
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002470- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2471 with their entity value.
2472
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002473- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2474
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002475- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2476 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002477
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002478- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2479 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002480 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002481
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002482- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2483 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2484 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2485 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2486 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2487 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2488 main():
2489
2490 import locale
2491 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2492
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002493- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2494 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2495
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002496- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2497 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2498 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2499 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2500 to the new standard.
2501
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002502- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2503 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2504 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2505 an extension to the database.
2506
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002507- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2508 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2509 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2510 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002511 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002512
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002513- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002514 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002515
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002516- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2517 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2518 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2519 bounded integers.
2520
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002521- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2522 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2523 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2524 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2525 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2526 in existence.
2527
2528 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2529 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2530 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2531 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2532 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2533 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2534
2535 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2536 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2537 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2538 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2539
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002540- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2541 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2542 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2543
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002544- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2545
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002546- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2547 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2548 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2549 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2550
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002551- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2552 argument.
2553
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002554- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2555 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2556 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2557 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2558 [SF patch 560794].
2559
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002560- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2561 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2562 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002563 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2564 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2565 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002566
2567- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2568 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002569
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002570- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2571 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2572 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2573 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002574
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002575- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2576 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2577 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2578 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2579 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2580
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002581- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002582
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002583- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2584
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002585- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2586 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2587 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2588 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2589 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2590 identical to None.
2591
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002592- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2593 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2594 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2595 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2596 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2597 results now.
2598
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002599- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2600 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2601
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002602- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2603 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2604 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2605 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2606 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2607 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2608 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2609 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2610
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002611- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2612
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002613- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2614 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2615
2616- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2617 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2618 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2619 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2620 and other systems.
2621
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002622- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2623 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2624 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2625 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 +00002626 work well with these.
2627
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002628- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2629
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002630- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002631 connections.
2632
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002633- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2634 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2635 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2636
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002637- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2638 sets
2639
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002640- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2641 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2642 name.
2643
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002644- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2645 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2646 passed in.
2647
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002648- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002649 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002650 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2651 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002652
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002653- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2654
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002655- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2656
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002657- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2658 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2659 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2660
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002661- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2662 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2663 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2664 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002665 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002666
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002667- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002668 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002669 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002670
2671- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2672 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2673 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2674
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002675- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002676 the value of its expression argument.
2677
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002678- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2679 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2680 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2681
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002682- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2683 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2684 skipstone browser was included.
2685
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002686- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2687 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2688
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002689Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002690-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002691
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002692- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2693 names in addition to accepting file names.
2694
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002695- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2696 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2697 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2698 still used and useful.)
2699
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002700- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2701 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2702 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2703 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002704
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002705- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2706 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2707 the generated binary.
2708
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002709Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002710-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002711
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002712- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2713
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002714- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2715 except in the hands of experts.
2716
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002717- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002718 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2719 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2720 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002721
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002722- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2723 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2724 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2725 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2726 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2727 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2728 builds.
2729
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002730- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2731 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2732 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2733 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2734 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2735 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2736 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2737 new type.
2738
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002739- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002740
2741 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2742 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2743 positive infinities.
2744
2745 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2746 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2747 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2748 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2749 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2750 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2751 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2752
2753 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2754
2755 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2756
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002757- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2758 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2759 size of the executable.
2760
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002761- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2762 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2763 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2764 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002765
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002766- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2767
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002768- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2769 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2770 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002771
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002772- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2773 well as Unix.
2774
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002775- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2776 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2777 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2778 modules in the README file for details.
2779
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002780C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002782
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002783- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2784 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002785 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002786 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002787 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002788
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002789- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2790 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2791 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2792 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2793 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2794 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002795 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002796 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2797 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2798 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2799 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2800 aligned.)
2801
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002802- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2803 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2804 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2805
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002806- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2807 level.
2808
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002809- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2810 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2811 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2812 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2813 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2814
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002815- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2816 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2817 code.
2818
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002819- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2820 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2821 adjusting for negative indices.
2822
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002823- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2824 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2825 object.
2826
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002827- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2828 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2829 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2830
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002831- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2832 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002833
2834- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2835
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002836- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2837 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2838 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2839 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2840
2841- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2842
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002843- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002844
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002845- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002846 without going through the buffer API.
2847
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002848- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002849
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002850- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2851 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2852 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2853 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2854
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002855- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2856 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2857
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002858- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002859 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2860
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002861New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002862-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002863
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002864- OpenVMS is now supported.
2865
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002866- AtheOS is now supported.
2867
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002868- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2869
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002870- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2871
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002872Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002873-----
2874
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002875- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2876 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2877 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002878
2879Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002880-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002881
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002882- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2883 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2884 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2885 bugs.
2886 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002887 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002888 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2889 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002890 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002891
2892- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002893 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002894
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002895- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2896 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2897
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002898- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2899 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002900 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002901 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2902
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002903- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2904 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2905 use files" uninstall option).
2906
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002907- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2908
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002909- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2910 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2911
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002912- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2913 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2914 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2915
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002916- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2917 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2918 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2919 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2920 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002921 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2922 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2923 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002924
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002925- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002926 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002927 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2928 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2929 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2930 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2931 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2932 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2933 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2934 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2935 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2936 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2937 work around.
2938
2939- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2940 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2941 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2942 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2943 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2944 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2945 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2946 specified with O_CREAT too).
2947
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002948Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002949----
2950
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002951- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002952
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002953- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2954 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2955 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2956
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002957- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2958 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2959 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2960
2961- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2962 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2963 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2964 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2965 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2966 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2967 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2968 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002969
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002970- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2971 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2972 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002973
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002974- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2975 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2976 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2977 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2978 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002979
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002980- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2981 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2982 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002983
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002984- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2985 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002986
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002987- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2988 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2989 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2990 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2991 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002992
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002993- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2994 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2995 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2996
2997- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2998 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2999 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003000
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003001- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3002 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3003 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3004 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003005 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003006
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003007- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3008 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003009
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003010- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3011 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003012
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003013- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003014 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003015 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3016 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003017
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003018
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003019What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003020===============================
3021
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003022*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3023
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003024Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003025--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003026
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003027- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3028 with a custom metaclass.
3029
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003030Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003031-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003032
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003033- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3034 are proxies.
3035
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003036Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003037-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003038
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003039- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3040 very short strings.
3041
3042- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3043 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3044 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3045 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3046 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3047
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003048Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003049-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003050
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003051- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3052 close or delete time).
3053
3054- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3055 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3056
3057- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3058
3059- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003060 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003061
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003062Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003063-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003064
3065Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003066-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003067
3068C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003069-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003070
3071New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003072-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003073
3074Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003075-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003076
3077Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003078-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003079
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003080- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3081
3082- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3083 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3084
3085- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3086 deleted at process exit time.
3087
3088- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3089 in backslash.
3090
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003091Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003092----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003093
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003094- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3095 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3096 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3097
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003098
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003099What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003100===========================
3101
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003102*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3103
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003104Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003105--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003106
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003107- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3108 been extensively updated. See
3109
3110 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3111
3112 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3113
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003114- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3115 deleted!
3116
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003117- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3118 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3119 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3120 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3121 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3122
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003123- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3124
3125 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3126 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3127
3128 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3129 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3130 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3131 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3132 supported anyway.
3133
3134 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3135 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3136
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003137- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3138 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3139 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3140 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3141 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003142
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003143- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3144 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3145 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3146
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003147Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003148-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003149
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003150- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3151 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3152 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3153 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3154 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3155 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003156 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3157 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3158 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3159 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003160
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003161- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3162 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3163 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3164
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003165Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003166-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003167
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003168- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3169
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003170Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003171-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003172
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003173- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3174 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3175 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3176 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3177 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3178 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3179
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003180- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3181
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003182- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3183
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003184- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3185
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003186- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3187 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3188 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3189
3190- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3191
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003192Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003193-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003194
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003195- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3196 off a search on Google.
3197
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003198Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003199-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003200
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003201- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3202 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3203 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3204 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3205 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3206 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3207 other platforms should do likewise.
3208
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003209- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3210 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3211 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3212
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003213C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003214-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003215
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003216- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3217 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3218 producing key-value pairs.
3219
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003220- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003221 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003222 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3223 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3224 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3225 previously went unchallenged.
3226
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003227New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003228-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003229
3230Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003232
3233Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003235
3236Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003237----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003238
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003239- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3240 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003241
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003242- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3243 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3244 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3245 home.
3246
3247
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003248What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003249===========================
3250
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003251*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3252
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003253Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003254--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003255
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003256- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3257 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003258
3259 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003260 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003261
3262 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3263 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003264 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003265 This needs to be documented.
3266
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003267- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3268 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3269
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003270- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3271 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3272 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3273
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003274- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3275 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3276
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003277- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3278 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3279 class forbids it).
3280
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003281- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3282 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3283 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3284
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003285- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3286
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003287Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003289
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003290- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3291 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003292 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003293
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003294- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3295 (like 1 + '').
3296
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003297Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003299
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003300- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3301 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3302 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3303 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003304 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003305 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3306
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003307- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3308 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3309 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3310 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3311
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003312- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3313 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003314 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3315 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3316 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003317
3318- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3319 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003320
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003321- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3322 bytes on its input.
3323
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003324Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003325-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003326
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003327- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003328 convenience function.
3329
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003330- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3331 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3332 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003333 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3334 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3335 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3336 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3337 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3338 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003339
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003340- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3341 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3342 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3343 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3344
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003345- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3346 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3347 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3348
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003349- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3350 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3351 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3352 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3353
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003354- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3355 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003356 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003357 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3358 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3359 new -l and -e options.
3360
3361- statcache is now deprecated.
3362
3363- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3364 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003365 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003366 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3367 time properly taken into account.
3368
3369- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3370 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3371 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3372 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3373
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003374Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003375-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003376
3377Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003379
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003380- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3381 is built with libdb3 if available.
3382
3383- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3384
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003385C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003386-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003387
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003388- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3389 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3390 PySequence_Size().
3391
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003392- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3393
3394- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3395 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3396 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3397
3398- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3399 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3400
3401- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3402 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3403
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003404New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003405-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003406
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003407- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3408 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3409
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003410- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3411 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3412
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003413- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3414
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003415Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003417
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003418- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3419 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3420
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003421Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003423
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003424Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003425----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003426
3427- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3428 removed completely in the next release.
3429
3430- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3431 OSX.
3432
3433- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3434 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3435
3436- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3437
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003438
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003439What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003440===========================
3441
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003442*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3443
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003444Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003445--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003446
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003447- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003448 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003449 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003450 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3451 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003452 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3453 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003454 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3455 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003456
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003457- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3458 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3459
3460- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3461 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3462
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003463Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003464-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003465
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003466- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3467 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3468 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3469 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3470 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3471 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3472 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3473 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3474
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003475- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3476 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3477 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3478 example).
3479
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003480- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003481 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003482 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003483 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003484
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003485- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3486 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3487 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003488 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003489
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003490- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3491 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3492 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3493 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3494 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3495 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3496
3497 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3498
3499 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3500
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003501Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003502-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003503
3504- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3505
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003506- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3507
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003508- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3509 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003510
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003511- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3512 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3513 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3514 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3515 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3516 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003517 attributes.
3518
3519- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3520 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3521 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003522
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003523- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3524 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3525 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003526
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003527- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3528 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3529 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003530 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3531 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3532
3533- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3534 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003535
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003536Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003538
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003539- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3540 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3541
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003542- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3543 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3544 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3545 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3546
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003547- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3548 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3549 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3550 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3551
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003552 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3553 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3554 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3555 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3556 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3557 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3558 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3559 without losing information).
3560
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003561- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003562 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3563 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3564 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3565 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3566 module).
3567
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003568 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003569 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3570 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3571 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3572 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003573
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003574- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003575 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3576 encoding.
3577
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003578- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3579 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3580
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003582 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3583
3584- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3585 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3586 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3587 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3588
3589- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3590
3591- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3592 ON, and OFF.
3593
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003594- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3595 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3596
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003597Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003598-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003599
3600- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3601 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3602 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003603
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003604- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3605 been added: -X and -E.
3606
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003607Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003609
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003610- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3611 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3612
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003613C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003615
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003616- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3617 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3618 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3619 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3620 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3621
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003622- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3623 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3624 as long) arguments.
3625
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003626- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3627 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3628 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3629 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3630 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3631 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3632
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003633- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3634 input.
3635
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003636New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003637-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003638
3639Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003640-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003641
3642Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003644
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003645- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3646 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3647 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3648
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003649- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3650 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3651 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003652 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003653
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003654 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3655 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3656 import signal
3657 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003660 while 1:
3661 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003663 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3664 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3665 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3666 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003667
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003668
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003669What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3670===========================
3671
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003672*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3673
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003674Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003675--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003676
3677- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3678 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3679 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3680
3681- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3682 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3683 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3684 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3685 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3686 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3687 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003688
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003689- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003690 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003691 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3692 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3693 associate a docstring with a property.
3694
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003695- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3696 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3697 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3698 other built-in object types.
3699
3700- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3701 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3702 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3703 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3704 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3705
3706- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3707 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3708
3709- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3710 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003711 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003712 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3713 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3714 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3715 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3716 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3717
3718- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3719 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3720 class.
3721
3722- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3723 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3724 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3725 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3726
3727- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3728 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3729 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3730 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3731
3732- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3733 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3734
3735- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3736 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3737 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3738 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3739 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003740 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003741 with the same value as s.
3742
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003743- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3744
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003745Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003746----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003747
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003748- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3749
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003750- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3751 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3752 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3753 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3754 objects.
3755
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003756- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3757 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003758 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3759 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3760
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003761- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3762 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3763 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3764
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003765Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003767
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003768- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3769 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3770 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3771 by the instances.
3772
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003773- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3774 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3775 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3776
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003777- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3778 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3779 before the entire comparison is complete.
3780
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003781- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3782 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3783 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3784
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003785- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3786 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3787 getwriter().
3788
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003789- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3790 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3791
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003792- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003793 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3794 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3795
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003796- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3797 iterable object.
3798
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003799- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3800 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003801
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003802- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3803 authentication.
3804
3805- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3806 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003807
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003808- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003809 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3810 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3811 a sample driver.)
3812
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003813Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003814-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003815
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003816- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3817 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3818 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3819 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3820 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3821 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3822 kernel has large file support.
3823
3824- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3825 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3826 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3827 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3828 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3829
3830- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3831 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3832 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3833
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003834C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003836
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003837- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3838 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3839
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003840New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003842
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003843- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3844 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3845
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003846Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003847-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003848
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003849- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3850 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3851 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3852 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3853 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3854
3855- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3856 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3857 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3858 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3859
3860- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3861 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3862
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003863Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003865
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003866- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003867 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3868 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003869
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003870
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003871What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3872===========================
3873
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003874*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3875
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003876Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003877----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003878
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003879- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3880 big to represent as a C double.
3881
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003882- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3883 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3884 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3885 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3886 restriction).
3887
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003888- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3889 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3890 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3891 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3892 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3893
3894 >>> dir([])
3895 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3896 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3897 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3898 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3899 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3900 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3901 'reverse', 'sort']
3902
3903 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3904
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003905- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003906 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3907 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3908 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3909 OverflowError exception.
3910
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003911- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003912 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003913 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3914 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3915 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3916 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3917 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003918 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3920 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3921
3922 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3923 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3924 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3925 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003926
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003927- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003928 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3929 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3930 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3931 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3932 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3933 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3934 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3935 once it is created.
3936
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003937- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3938 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3939 (key, value) pairs.
3940
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003941- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003942 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3943 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3944
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003945- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3946 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3947 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3948 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3949 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003950
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003951- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003952 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3953 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3954
3955 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3956
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003957- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003958 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3959
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003960Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003962
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003963- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003964 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3965 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003966
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003967- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3968 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3969 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3970 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3971 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3972 in this area anymore).
3973
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003974- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3975 threading.Timer.
3976
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003977- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3978 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3979
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003980- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003981 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3982
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003983- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003984 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3985 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3986 converted to Python longs.
3987
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003988- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003989 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3990
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003991- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3992 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3993 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3994
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003995Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003996-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003997
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003998- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3999 division operators as per PEP 238.
4000
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004001Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004003
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004004- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4005 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4006 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4007 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4008
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004009C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004010-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004011
4012- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004013
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004014- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4015 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004016 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004017
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4019 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004020 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004022
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004023- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004024 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4025 module:
4026
4027 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004028
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004029 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4030 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004031
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004032 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4033 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004034
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004035 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4036
4037 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4038
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004039- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004040 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4041 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4042 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004043
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004044New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004045-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004046
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004047- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4048 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4049 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4050 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4051 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004052
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004053Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004055
4056Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004057-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004058
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004059- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4060 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4061 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4062 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004063 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4064 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4065 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4066 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4067 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004068
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004069- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004070 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4071
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004072
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004073What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4074===========================
4075
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4077
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004078Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004080
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004081- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4082 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4083
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004084- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4085 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4086 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004087
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004088- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4089 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4090 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4091 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004092
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004093- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4094
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004095- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004096
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004097Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004099
4100- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004101 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004102 the module docstring for details.
4103
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004104Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004105-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004106
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004107- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004108 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4109 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4110 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004111
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004112- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4113 Nick Mathewson.
4114
4115Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004117
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004118- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4119 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4120 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4121 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4122 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4123 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4124 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4125 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4126
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004127- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4128 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4129 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4130 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4131
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004132- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4133 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4134 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4135 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4136 come a long way).
4137
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004138- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4139 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4140 write filters for these warnings).
4141
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004142- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4143 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4144 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4145 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4146 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4147
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004148- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4149 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4150 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4151 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4152 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4153 older distribution.
4154
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004155Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004156-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004157
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004158- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4159 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004160 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004161
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004162- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4163 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4164 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4165
4166- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4167
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004168- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4169
4170- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4171
4172- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4173
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004174- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004175
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004176- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4177
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004178New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004180
4181C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004182-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004183
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004184- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4185 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4186 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4187 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4188 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4189 against buffer overruns.
4190
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004191- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004192 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4193 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004194 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4195 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4196 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4197
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004198- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4199 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4200 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4201 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4202 deprecated.
4203
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004204Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004205-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004206
4207- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4208 relevant is found.
4209
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004210
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004211What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004212===========================
4213
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4215
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004216Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004218
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004219- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4220 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4221 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4222 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4223 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4224 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4225 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4226 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004227 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004228 repaired.
4229
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004230- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004231 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004232 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4233 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4234 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4235 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4236 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4237 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4238 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4239 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4240
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004241- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4242 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4243 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4244 leading BMO character).
4245
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004246- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4247 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4248 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4249
4250 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4251 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4252 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004253
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004254 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4255 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4256 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4257 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4258 for various simple to use conversions.
4259
4260 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4261 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4264 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4265 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4266 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4267 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4268 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4269 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4270 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4271 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4272 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4273 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4274 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4275 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4276 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4277 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004278
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004279- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4280 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4281 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004282 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004283 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004284
4285 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004286 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4287 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4288 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4289 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4290 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004291 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4292 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004293
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004294 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4295 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4296 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004297 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004298
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004299- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4300 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4301 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4302 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4303 floating arithmetic,
4304
4305 x = 9007199254740992.0
4306 print long(x)
4307
4308 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4309 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4310 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4311 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4312 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4313 functions are of good quality).
4314
4315 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4316 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4317 algorithms to break.
4318
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004319- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4320 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4321 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4322 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4323 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4324 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4325 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4326 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4327 order.
4328
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004329- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4330 operation along the most common code paths.
4331
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004332- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4333 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4334
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004335- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4336 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4337 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4338 {}.update(UserDict())
4339
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004340- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4341 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4342 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4343 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4344 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4345 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4346 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4347 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4348
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004349- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004350 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004352 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004353 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4354 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004355 join() method of strings
4356 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004357 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4358 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004360 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004361
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004362- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4363 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4364
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004365- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4366 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4367
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004368- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4369 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4370 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4371 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4372
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004373- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4374 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004375 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004376 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4377 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004378
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004379- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4380
4381
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004382Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004384
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004385- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004386 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004387 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4388 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4389
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004390- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4391 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4392
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004393- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4394 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4395 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4396 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4397
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004398- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4399 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4400 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4401
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004402- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4403
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004404- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4405
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004406- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4407 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4408 that are still imported into string.py).
4409
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004410- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4411
4412- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4413 Now it does.
4414
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004415- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4416
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004417- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4418 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4419 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4420 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4421 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004422 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4423 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004424
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004425- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4426 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4427 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4428 'help(object)'.
4429
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004430Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004432
4433- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004434 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004435 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4436 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4437
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004438- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004439 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4440 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004441
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004442C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004443-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004444
4445- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4446 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447
4448----
4449
4450**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**