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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +000015- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
16 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
17 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
18 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
19 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
20
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000021- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
22
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000023- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
24 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
25
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000026- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
27 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
28 modified the list.
29
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000030- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
31 functions is now writable.
32
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000033- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
34 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
35 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
36 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
37
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000038- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
39 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
40 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
41 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
42 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000043
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000044- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
45 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
46
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000047Extension modules
48-----------------
49
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000050- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
51 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
52 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
53 supposed to have been truncated away.
54
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000055- Added socket.socketpair().
56
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +000057- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
58 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
59
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000060Library
61-------
62
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +000063- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
64 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +000065
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +000066- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
67 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
68
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +000069- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
70
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +000071- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
72
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +000073- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
74
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +000075- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
76 Percivall.
77
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +000078- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
79 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
80
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000081- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
82 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
83 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000084 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000085
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +000086- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
87 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
88 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
89 and exponent.
90
91- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
92
93- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
94 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
95 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
96
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000097- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
98 to the readline module.
99
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000100- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000101 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
102 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000103
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000104- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
105 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
106 contains symlinks.
107
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000108- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
109 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
110
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000111- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
112 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
113 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
114
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000115- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
116 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
117 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
118 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
119 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
120 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
121 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
122 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
123 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
124 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
125 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
126 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
127 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
128
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000129- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
130
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000131Tools/Demos
132-----------
133
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000134- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
135 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
136
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000137- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
138
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000139Build
140-----
141
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000142- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
143 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
144
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000145- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
146 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
147
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000148- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
149 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
150
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000151- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
152 GNU/k*BSD systems.
153
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000154- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
155 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
156
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000157C API
158-----
159
160Documentation
161-------------
162
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000163- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
164 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
165
166- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
167 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
168 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000169
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000170New platforms
171-------------
172
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000173- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
174
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000175Tests
176-----
177
178Windows
179-------
180
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000181- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
182 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
183 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
184 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
185 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
186 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
187 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
188 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
189 the problem.
190
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000191Mac
192---
193
194
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000195What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
196=================================
197
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000198*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000199
200Core and builtins
201-----------------
202
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000203- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
204 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
205 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
206 sensitive code.
207
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000208- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
209 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
210 @staticmethod
211 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000212 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000213
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000214- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
215 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
216 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
217 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
218 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
219 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
220 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
221 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
222 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
223 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
224 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
225
226 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
227 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
228 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
229 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
230 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
231 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
232 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
233
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000234- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
235 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
236
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000237- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000238 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000239
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000240- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000241 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000242 which was missing for no apparent reason.
243
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000244- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000245 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
246 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
247
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000248- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
249 types that support garbage collection.
250
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000251- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
252
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000253- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
254 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
255 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
256 Jython.
257
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000258- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
259
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000260- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
261 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
262
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000263- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
264 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
265 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000266
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000267- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
268 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
269 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
270
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000271Extension modules
272-----------------
273
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000274- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
275
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000276Library
277-------
278
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000279- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
280 TIS-620
281
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000282- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
283 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
284 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
285 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
286 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
287 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
288 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
289 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
290 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
291 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
292
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000293- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
294
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000295- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
296 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
297 same as when the argument is omitted).
298 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
299
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000300- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
301
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000302- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
303 schemes are offered.
304
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000305- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
306
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000307- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
308 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
309 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
310
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000311- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
312
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000313- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
314 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
315
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000316- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
317 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
318 when dummy_threading is being used.
319
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000320- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
321 from a tarfile.
322
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000323- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000324 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000325
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000326- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
327 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
328 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
329 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
330
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000331- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
332 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
333
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000334- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
335 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
336 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
337 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
338 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
339 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
340 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
341 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
342 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
343 by some other method in progress).
344
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000345- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
346 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
347 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000348
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000349- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
350
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000351- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
352 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
353 AM Kuchling.
354
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000355- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
356 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
357 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
358
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000359- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
360 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
361 instead of unsigned.
362
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000363- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000364 no longer part of the public API.
365
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000366- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
367 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
368 string methods of the same name).
369
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000370- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000371 SF patch 945642.
372
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000373- doctest unittest integration improvements:
374
375 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
376
377 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
378 DocTestSuites.
379
380- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
381 that provide thread-local data.
382
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000383- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
384 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
385
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000386- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
387
388- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
389 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
390 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
391
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000392- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
393
394 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
395 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
396 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000397
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000398 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
399 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
400 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
401 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
402
403 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
404 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
405
406 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
407 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
408 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
409 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
410
411 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
412 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
413 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
414 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
415 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
416
417 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
418 wrapping help output.
419
420 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
421 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
422 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000423
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000424C API
425-----
426
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000427- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
428 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
429 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
430 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
431 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
432 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
433 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
434 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
435 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
436 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
437 its visible semantics have not changed.
438
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000439- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
440 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
441
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000442Documentation
443-------------
444
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000445- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000446
447 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000448 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000449
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000450 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000451
452 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
453
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000454- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000455
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000456Tests
457-----
458
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000459- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000460 platforms that use the Makefile.
461
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000462- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
463 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
464 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
465
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000466
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000467What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
468=================================
469
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000470*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000471
472Core and builtins
473-----------------
474
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000475- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
476 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
477 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
478 objects now (one object instead of three).
479
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000480- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
481 Windows DLLs.
482
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000483- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
484 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000485
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000486- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
487 a new .pyc magic.
488
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000489- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
490 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
491 be there.
492
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000493- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
494 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
495 the LC_NUMERIC category.
496
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000497- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
498 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
499 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
500
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000501- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
502
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000503- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
504 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
505 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000506
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000507- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
508 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
509
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000510- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
511
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000512- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000513 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000514
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000515- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
516
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000517- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
518
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000519- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
520 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
521
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000522- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
523 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
524 Fixes bug #858016 .
525
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000526- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
527 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
528 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
529
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000530- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
531 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
532 improves their performance (about 35%).
533
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000534- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
535 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
536 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
537
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000538- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
539 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
540 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
541 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
542
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000543- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
544 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
545 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
546 length is not known).
547
548- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
549 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000550 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
551 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000552 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
553
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000554- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
555 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
556
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000557- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
558 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
559 keyword arguments.
560
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000561- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
562 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
563 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
564
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000565- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
566 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
567 cases.
568
569- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
570 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
571 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
572 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
573 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
574 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
575 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
576 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
577 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
578 a release build.
579
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000580- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
581 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
582
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000583- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000584 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000585
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000586- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
587 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
588 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
589 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
590 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
591 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
592 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
593 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
594 destroyed.
595
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000596- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
597 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
598 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
599 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
600 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
601 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
602 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
603 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
604
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000605- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
606 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
607 character other than a space.
608
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000609- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
610 by the function object or by the method object, the function
611 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
612 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
613 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
614 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
615 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
616 attributes with the same name.
617
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000618- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
619 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
620 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
621 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
622 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
623 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
624 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
625 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
626 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
627 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
628 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
629 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
630 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
631 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000632
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000633- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
634 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
635 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
636 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
637 This has been repaired.
638
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000639- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
640
641- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
642
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000643- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
644 over a sequence.
645
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000646- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000647 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000648
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000649- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
650
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000651- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
652 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
653 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
654 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
655 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
656 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
657 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
658 records with equal keys is unchanged).
659
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000660- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
661 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
662 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
663
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000664- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
665 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
666 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
667 freelist.
668
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000669- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
670 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
671
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000672- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
673 number.
674
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000675- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
676 a TypeError exception.
677
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000678- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
679 820195.
680
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000681- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
682 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
683 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
684
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000685- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000686 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
687 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000688
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000689- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
690 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
691 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
692
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000693- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
694 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000695 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000696
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000697- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000698 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
699 the first call.
700
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000701
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000702Extension modules
703-----------------
704
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000705- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
706 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
707
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000708- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
709 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
710 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
711 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
712 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
713 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
714 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000715
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000716- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
717
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000718- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
719
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000720- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
721 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
722
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000723- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
724 fewer false positives.
725
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000726- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
727 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
728
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000729- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000730 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
731
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000732- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000733 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000734 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
735 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
736 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000737
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000738- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
739 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
740 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
741 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
742
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000743- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
744 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
745 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
746 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
747 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
748 #897625.
749
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000750- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
751 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
752
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000753- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
754 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
755 and pops on either side of the deque.
756
757- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
758 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
759
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000760- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
761 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
762 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
763 other functions that expect a function argument.
764
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000765- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
766
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000767- os.getsid was added.
768
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000769- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
770 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
771 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
772
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000773- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
774
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000775- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
776
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000777- readline.clear_history was added.
778
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000779- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
780
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000781- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
782
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000783- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
784
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000785- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
786
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000787- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
788
789- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
790
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000791- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
792
793- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
794
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000795- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
796 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
797 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
798
799- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
800 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
801 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
802 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
803 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
804 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
805 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
806
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000807- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
808 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
809 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
810 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000811
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000812- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000813 iterators from a single iterable.
814
815- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
816 of raising a TypeError exception.
817
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000818- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
819 as parameter.
820
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000821Library
822-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000823
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000824- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
825 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
826 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000827
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000828- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
829 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
830 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000831
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000832- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000833
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000834- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
835 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000836
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000837- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
838 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
839
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000840- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
841
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000842- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000843 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000844
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000845- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
846 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
847
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000848- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
849
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000850- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
851 on cygwin and mingw32.
852
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000853- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
854
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000855- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
856 module.
857
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000858- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
859 installation scheme for all platforms.
860
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000861- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000862 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000863
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000864- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
865 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
866 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
867
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000868- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
869 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
870 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
871
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000872- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
873
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000874- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
875
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000876- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
877 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
878
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000879- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
880 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
881 type pattern with the same value exists.
882
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000883- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
884 when run from the command prompt).
885
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000886- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
887 not taken into consideration when caching value.
888
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000889- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
890 default sort).
891
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000892- Added global runctx function to profile module
893
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000894- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
895
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000896- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
897
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000898- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
899
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000900- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000901 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
902 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
903 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
904 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
905 accordingly.
906
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000907- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
908 decoding standards.
909
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000910- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
911 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
912 called for all requests.
913
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000914- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
915 they are passed to the compiler.
916
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000917- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
918 indent, width and depth.
919
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000920- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
921 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
922
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000923- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
924 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
925
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000926- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
927
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000928- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
929
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000930- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
931
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000932- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
933 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
934
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000935- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000936 for better performance.
937
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000938- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000939
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000940- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
941 a string).
942
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000943- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
944
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000945- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
946
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000947- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
948
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000949- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
950
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000951- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
952 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
953 list of fieldnames.
954
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000955- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
956 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
957
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000958- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
959
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000960- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
961 empty lists.
962
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000963- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
964 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
965 and shelves.
966
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000967- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
968 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
969
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000970- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000971 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
972 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000973
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000974- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
975 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000976 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000977
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000978- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000979 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
980 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
981
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000982- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
983 and removed in Py2.4.
984
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000985- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
986
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000987- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
988
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000989Tools/Demos
990-----------
991
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000992- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
993 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
994
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000995- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
996
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000997- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
998 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
999 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1000 destination in situations where both files are given.
1001
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001002- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1003 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1004 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1005 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1006
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001007- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1008
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001009- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1010 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1011 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1012 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1013 now.
1014
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001015- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1016 in effect
1017
1018- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1019 C-c C-h
1020
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001021- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1022 -d option was given.
1023
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001024Build
1025-----
1026
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001027- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1028 build under OS X.
1029
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001030- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1031 --enable-profiling.
1032
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001033- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1034 is configured --with-tsc.
1035
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001036- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1037 on AMD64.
1038
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001039- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1040 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1041
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001042- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1043 removed.
1044
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001045- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1046 supported (see PEP 11).
1047
1048- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1049
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001050- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1051
1052- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1053 (see PEP 11).
1054
1055- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1056 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1057
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001058C API
1059-----
1060
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001061- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1062 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1063 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1064
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001065- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1066 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1067 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1068 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1069
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001070- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1071 generator objects.
1072
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001073- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1074 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001075 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1076 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001077
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001078- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1079 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1080
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001081- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1082 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1083 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1084 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1085 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1086
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001087- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1088 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1089 about 10% faster.
1090
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001091- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1092 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1093
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001094- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1095 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1096 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1097 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1098
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001099Windows
1100-------
1101
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001102- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1103 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1104 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1105 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1106
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001107- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1108 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1109 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1110
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001111
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001112What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1113===============================
1114
1115*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1116
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001117IDLE
1118----
1119
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001120- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1121 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1122 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1123 context-menu actions.
1124
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001125- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1126 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1127 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1128 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1129 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1130 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1131 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1132 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1133 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1134
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001135
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001136What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1137=============================================
1138
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001139*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001140
1141Core and builtins
1142-----------------
1143
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001144- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001145 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001146 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1147
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001148Extension modules
1149-----------------
1150
1151- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1152 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1153 than once. This has been fixed.
1154
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001155- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1156 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1157 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1158 call.
1159
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001160- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1161
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001162Library
1163-------
1164
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001165- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1166 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1167
1168- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1169 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1170 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1171 restored.
1172
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001173IDLE
1174----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001175
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001176- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001177
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001178Build
1179-----
1180
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001181- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1182 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1183
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001184C API
1185-----
1186
1187Windows
1188-------
1189
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001190- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1191 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1192
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001193- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1194
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001195Mac
1196---
1197
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001198- Various fixes to pimp.
1199
1200- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1201
1202- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1203 more problems than it solves.
1204
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001205
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001206What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1207=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001208
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001209*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1210
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001211Core and builtins
1212-----------------
1213
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001214- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1215 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1216
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001217- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1218 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001219 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001220
1221- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1222 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1223 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001224 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001225
1226- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1227 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001228
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001229- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1230 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1231 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1232
1233- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001234 770247.
1235
1236- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001237
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001238Extension modules
1239-----------------
1240
1241- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1242 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1243
1244- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1245
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001246- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1247
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001248- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1249 contained within the _strptime module.
1250
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001251- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1252 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1253
1254- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001255 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1256
1257- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1258 the find_class attribute, if present.
1259
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001260- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001261
1262 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1263 (SF bug 763298).
1264
1265 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001266 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1267 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1268 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001269
1270 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1271
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001272Library
1273-------
1274
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001275- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1276
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001277- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1278 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1279 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1280 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1281 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1282 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1283 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1284 or Tester().
1285
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001286- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1287 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1288 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1289 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1290 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1291 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1292 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1293 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1294 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001295
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001296 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001297
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001298- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1299 weren't before was an oversight.
1300
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001301- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1302 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1303
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001304- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1305 when there are no lines.
1306
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001307- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1308 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1309
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001310- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1311 to child processes.
1312
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001313- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1314
1315- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1316
1317- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1318 xmlrpclib.
1319
1320- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1321 responses.
1322
1323- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1324 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1325
1326- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1327 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1328 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1329
1330- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1331 used as patterns.
1332
1333- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1334 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1335 than Tk 8.3.
1336
1337- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1338
1339- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001340
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001341Tools/Demos
1342-----------
1343
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001344- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1345
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001346- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1347
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001348- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001349
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001350Build
1351-----
1352
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001353- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1354
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001355- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1356
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001357- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1358 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001359
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001360- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1361 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1362 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001363
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001364C API
1365-----
1366
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001367- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1368 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1369
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001370Windows
1371-------
1372
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001373- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1374 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1375 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1376 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1377 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1378 Python exception ::
1379
1380 thread.error: can't start new thread
1381
1382 is raised now.
1383
1384- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1385 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1386 instead of from DLL teardown.
1387
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001388Mac
1389---
1390
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001391- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001392 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001393 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1394 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1395 the executable in the bundle.
1396
1397- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001398
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001399- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1400
1401- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1402 on Panther.
1403
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001404What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1405================================
1406
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001407*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001408
1409Core and builtins
1410-----------------
1411
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001412- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1413 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1414 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1415 with the -i option.
1416
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001417- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1418 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1419
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001420- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1421 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1422
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001423- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1424 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1425 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1426 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1427 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1428 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1429 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1430 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1431 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1432 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1433 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1434 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1435 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001436
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001437- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1438 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1439 embedded in a lambda expression.
1440
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001441- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1442 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1443 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1444 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1445 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1446
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001447- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1448 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1449 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1450
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001451- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1452 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1453
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001454- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1455 It's writable again.
1456
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001457- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1458 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1459 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001460 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001461
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001462- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1463 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1464 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1465
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001466Extension modules
1467-----------------
1468
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001469- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1470 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1471
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001472- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1473 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1474 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1475 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1476
1477- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1478 collection.
1479
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001480- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1481 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1482 unique within a single program run.
1483
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001484- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1485 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1486
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001487- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1488 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1489
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001490- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1491 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001492
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001493- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1494
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001495- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1496 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1497
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001498- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1499 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1500 for many BSD-derived systems.
1501
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001502
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001503Library
1504-------
1505
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001506- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1507 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1508 primary ones:
1509
1510 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1511 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1512 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1513
1514 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1515 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1516 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1517 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1518 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1519 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1520
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001521- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1522 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1523 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1524 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1525 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1526 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1527 argument.
1528
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001529- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1530 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1531 in the archive.
1532
1533- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1534 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1535
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001536- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1537 569574).
1538
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001539- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1540 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1541 no more.
1542
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001543- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1544 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1545 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1546 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1547 code coverage.
1548
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001549- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1550 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1551 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001552 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1553 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001554
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001555- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1556 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1557 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001558 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001559
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001560- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1561
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001562- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1563 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1564 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1565 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1566
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001567- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1568 handling.
1569
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001570- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1571 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1572
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001573- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1574 in socket.py.
1575
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001576- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1577
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001578- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1579 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1580 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1581 opener with proxy support.
1582
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001583- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1584
1585- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1586
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001587Tools/Demos
1588-----------
1589
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001590- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1591
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001592- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1593
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001594- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1595 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001596
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001597- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1598 files.
1599
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001600Build
1601-----
1602
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001603- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001604 different root directory.
1605
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001606C API
1607-----
1608
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001609- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1610 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1611 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1612 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1613 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1614 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1615 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1616 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1617 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1618 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1619
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001620- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1621 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1622 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1623 from Python.
1624
1625
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001626New platforms
1627-------------
1628
1629None this time.
1630
1631Tests
1632-----
1633
1634- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1635 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1636
1637Windows
1638-------
1639
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001640- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1641
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001642- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1643 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1644 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1645 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1646 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1647 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1648 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1649 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1650 that's what it's for.
1651
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001652Mac
1653---
1654
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001655- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1656 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1657 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1658 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001659- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1660 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1661- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001662
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001663SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1664------------------------------------
1665
1666430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1667598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1668622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1669661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1670683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1671697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1672713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1673724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1674727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1675729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1676730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1677731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1678732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1679733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1680735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1681740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1682744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1683745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1684747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1685749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1686751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1687753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1688755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1689757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1690760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1691
1692
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001693What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1694================================
1695
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001696*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001697
1698Core and builtins
1699-----------------
1700
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001701- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1702 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1703
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001704- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1705 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1706 and cannot be strings).
1707
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001708- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1709 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1710 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1711 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1712
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001713- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1714 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1715 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1716 Python itself.
1717
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001718- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1719 the referenced object, if it has one.
1720
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001721- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1722 the thread started at
1723 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1724
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001725- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1726 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1727 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1728 placed on a list index.
1729
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001730- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1731 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1732 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1733 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1734
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001735- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1736 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1737 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1738 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1739 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1740 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1741 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1742
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001743- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1744 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1745 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1746 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1747 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1748
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001749- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1750 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001751
1752- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1753 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1754 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1755 #693195.)
1756
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001757- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1758 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001759
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001760- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001761 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001762 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1763 interpreter executions, would fail.
1764
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001765- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001766 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001767 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001768
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001769Extension modules
1770-----------------
1771
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001772- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1773 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1774 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1775 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1776
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001777- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1778 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1779
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001780- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1781 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1782 and Greg Chapman.)
1783
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001784- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1785 recursively.
1786
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001787- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001788 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1789 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1790 leaks.
1791
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001792- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1793
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001794- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1795 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1796 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1797 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1798 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1799 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1800 #705836.
1801
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001802- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001803 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1804
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001805- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1806 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1807 See SF bug #692416.
1808
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001809- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1810 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1811
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001812- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1813 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1814 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001815
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001816- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001817 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1818 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1819
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001820- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1821 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1822 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1823 timeouts to work properly.
1824
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001825Library
1826-------
1827
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001828- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1829 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1830 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1831 future release.
1832
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001833- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1834 for querying platform dependent features.
1835
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001836- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001837
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001838- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1839 pickle protocol versions.
1840
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001841- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1842 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1843 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1844
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001845- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1846
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001847- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1848 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1849 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1850 modules.
1851
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001852- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1853 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1854 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1855
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001856- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1857 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1858
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001859- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1860 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1861 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1862
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001863- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001864 MS Office extensions.
1865
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001866- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1867 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1868
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001869- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1870 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1871
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001872- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1873 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1874 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1875 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1876 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1877 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1878
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001879- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1880 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1881 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001882
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001883- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1884 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1885 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1886
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001887- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1888
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001889- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1890 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1891 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1892
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001893Tools/Demos
1894-----------
1895
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001896- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1897 See the module docstring for details.
1898
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001899Build
1900-----
1901
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001902- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1903 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001904
1905C API
1906-----
1907
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001908- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1909
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001910- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1911 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1912 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1913
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001914- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1915 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001916
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001917 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1918 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1919 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001920
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001921- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001922 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1923
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001924- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1925 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1926 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001927
1928New platforms
1929-------------
1930
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001931None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001932
1933Tests
1934-----
1935
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001936- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1937 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001938
1939Windows
1940-------
1941
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001942- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1943 function.
1944
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001945- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1946 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001947
1948Mac
1949---
1950
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001951- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1952 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001953
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001954- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1955 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001956
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001957- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1958 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1959 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001960
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001961- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001962 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1963 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001964
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001965- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1966 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001967
1968
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001969What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1970=================================
1971
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001972*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001973
1974Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001975-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001976
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001977- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1978 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1979 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1980
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001981- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1982 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1983 (SF patch #664376.)
1984
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001985- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1986 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1987 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1988 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1989 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1990 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001991 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001992
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001993- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1994 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1995 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1996 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001997 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001998
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001999- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2000 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2001 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2002 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2003 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2004 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2005 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2006 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2007 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2008 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2009 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2010
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002011- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2012 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2013 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2014 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2015 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2016 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2017
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002018- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2019 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2020
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002021- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2022 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2023 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2024 case.)
2025
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002026- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2027 passed as unicode strings.
2028
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002029- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2030 See SF bug #683467.
2031
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002032- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2033 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2034
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002035- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2036
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002037- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2038
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002039- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2040 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2041 arguments.
2042
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002043- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2044 See SF bug #667147.
2045
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002046- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002047 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002048 See SF bug #676155.
2049
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002050- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002051 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002052 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2053 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2054 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2055 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2056 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2057 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002058
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002059Extension modules
2060-----------------
2061
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002062- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2063 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2064 tp_as_number pointer.
2065
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002066- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2067 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2068 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2069 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2070 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2071
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002072- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2073
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002074- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2075
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002076- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002077 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002078 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2079 patch #678531.)
2080
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002081- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2082 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2083
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002084- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2085 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2086
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002087- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2088
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002089- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2090 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2091 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2092
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002093- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2094
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002095- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2096 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2097
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002098- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002099
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002100- datetime changes:
2101
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002102 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2103
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002104 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2105 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2106 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2107 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2108 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2109 now.
2110
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002111 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002112 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2113 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002114
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002115 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002116 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002117 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2118 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2119 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2120 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002121
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002122 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2123 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2124 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002125 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2126
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002127 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2128 by a later example coded by Guido.
2129
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002130 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002131 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2132 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2133 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002134 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2135 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2136
2137 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2138 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2139 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2140 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2141 tzinfo subclass instance.
2142
2143 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2144 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2145 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2146 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2147 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2148 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2149 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2150 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002151
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002152 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2153 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2154 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2155 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2156 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002157 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2158
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002159 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002160
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002161 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2162 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2163 as a naive datetime object.
2164
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002165 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2166 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2167 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2168
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002169 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2170 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2171 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2172 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2173 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2174 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2175 comparison.
2176
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002177 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2178 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2179 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2180 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002181 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002182
2183 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002184
2185 and ::
2186
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002187 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2188
2189 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2190 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2191 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2192 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2193
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002194 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2195 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2196 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2197 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2198 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2199
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002200 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2201 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002202 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2203 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002204
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002205Library
2206-------
2207
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002208- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2209 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2210
2211- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2212 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2213 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2214 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2215 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2216 See PEP 307 for details.
2217
2218- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2219 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2220
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002221- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2222 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002223 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002224 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2225 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002226 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002227
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002228- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2229 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2230
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002231- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2232 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2233 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2234
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002235- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2236
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002237- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2238 exception.
2239
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002240- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2241 class.
2242
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002243- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2244 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2245 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2246
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002247- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2248 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2249
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002250- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002251 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2252 See SF bug #659228.
2253
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002254- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2255 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2256 See SF patch #651082.
2257
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002258- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002259
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002260- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2261 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2262
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002263- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002264 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002265
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002266- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2267 DOS paths from other platforms.
2268
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002269Tools/Demos
2270-----------
2271
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002272- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2273 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2274 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2275 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2276 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2277 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2278 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2279 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2280 example:
2281
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002282 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2283 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002284
2285 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2286
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002287
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002288Build
2289-----
2290
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002291- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2292 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2293 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002294 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2295
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002296 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2297
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002298- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2299 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2300 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2301 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2302 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2303 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2304 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2305 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2306 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2307
2308- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2309 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2310 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2311 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2312
2313- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2314 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2315
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002316C API
2317-----
2318
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002319- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2320 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002321
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002322- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2323 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2324 tp_as_number pointer.
2325
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002326- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2327 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2328 (SF #681367)
2329
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002330- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2331 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2332 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2333 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002334
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002335Tests
2336-----
2337
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002338- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002339 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2340 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2341 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2342 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2343 pydoc.)
2344
2345- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2346
2347- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002348
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002349Windows
2350-------
2351
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002352- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2353 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2354 time).
2355
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002356- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2357 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2358
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002359- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2360 release without strong cryptography.
2361
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002362- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002363 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002364
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002365- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2366 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2367
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002368Mac
2369---
2370
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002371- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2372 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002373
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002374- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2375 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2376 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002377
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002378- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2379 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002380
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002381- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2382 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2383 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2384 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002385
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002386- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002387 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2388 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2389 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002390
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002391
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002392What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002393=================================
2394
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002395*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002396
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002397Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002398--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002399
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002400- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2401
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002402- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2403 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002404 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002405 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002406 a different meaning than before.
2407
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002408- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002409 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002410 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002411
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002412- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002413 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002414 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002415
2416- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2417 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2418 and deallocation.
2419
2420- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2421 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2422
2423- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2424 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2425 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2426 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2427 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2428
2429- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2430 now detected by the garbage collector.
2431
2432- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2433 [SF bug 519621]
2434
2435- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2436 identifier.
2437
2438- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2439 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2440 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2441 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2442 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2443 [SF bug 563060]
2444
2445- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2446 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2447 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2448 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2449 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2450
2451- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2452 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2453 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2454
2455- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2456
2457- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2458 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2459 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2460 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2461 state of the slots would be lost.)
2462
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002463Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002464-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002465
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002466- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002467 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2468 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2469 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2470 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002471 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2472 Jython 2.1.
2473
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002474- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002475 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002476 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2477 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2478 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2479 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2480 these, see PEP 302.
2481
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002482- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2483 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2484 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2485
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002486- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2487 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2488 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2489
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002490- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2491 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2492 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2493
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002494- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2495 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2496 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2497 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2498 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2499 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2500 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2501 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2502 releases or implementations.
2503
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002504- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002505 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2506 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002507
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002508- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2509 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2510
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002511- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2512 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2513 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2514
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002515- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2516 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2517
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002518- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2519 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002520 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2521 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002522
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002523- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2524 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2525 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2526 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2527 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2528
2529 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2530 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2531 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2532 pattern.
2533
2534 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2535 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2536 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2537 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2538
2539 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2540 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2541 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2542 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2543 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2544 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2545
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002546- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2547 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2548 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2549 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2550 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2551 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2552 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2553 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002554
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002555- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2556 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2557 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2558 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2559 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002560 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2561 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2562 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2563 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2564 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2565 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2566 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002567
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002568- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2569 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2570
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002571- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2572 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2573 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2574 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2575 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2576 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2577 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2578 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2579 to Zack Weinberg!
2580
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002581- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2582 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2583 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2584 type. This has been fixed now.
2585
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002586- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2587 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2588 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2589
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002590- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2591 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2592 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2593 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2594 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2595 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2596 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2597 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002598 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002599
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002600- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2601 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2602 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002603
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002604- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2605 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2606 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2607 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2608 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2609 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2610 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2611 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002612 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002613 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2614 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2615
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002616- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2617 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2618 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2619 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2620 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2621 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2622 this.)
2623
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002624- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2625 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002626 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002627 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002628 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2629 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002630 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2631 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002632
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002633- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2634 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2635 currently running.
2636
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002637- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2638 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2639 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2640 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2641
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002642- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2643 as directory names.
2644
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002645- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2646 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2647
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002648- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2649 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2650
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002651- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002652 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2653 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002654
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002655- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2656 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2657 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2658 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2659 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2660
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002661- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2662 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2663 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2664 removed.
2665
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002666- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2667 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2668 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2669
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002670- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2671 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2672 to __debug__.
2673
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002674- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2675 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2676 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2677
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002678- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2679 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2680 deprecated now.
2681
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002682- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2683 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2684 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002685
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002686- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2687 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2688 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2689 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2690 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002691
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002692- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2693 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2694
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002695- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2696 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2697 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002698 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002699 is backward compatible.
2700
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002701- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2702 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2703 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2704 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2705 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2706
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002707- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2708 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2709 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2710 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2711 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2712 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002713
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002714- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2715 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2716
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002717- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2718 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2719
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002720- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2721 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2722 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2723 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2724 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2725
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002726- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2727 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2728 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2729
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002730- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002731 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2732
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002733- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2734 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2735 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002736
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002737- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2738 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2739
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002740- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2741 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2742 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2743
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002744- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2745
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002746Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002747-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002748
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002749- Added three operators to the operator module:
2750 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2751 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2752 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2753
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002754- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2755
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002756- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2757 archives.
2758
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002759- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2760 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2761 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2762
2763 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2764
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002765- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2766 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2767 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002768 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002769
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002770- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2771 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2772 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2773 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002774 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2775 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2776 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2777 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002778
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002779- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2780 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002781
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002782- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2783
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002784- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2785 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2786
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002787- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2788 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2789 supported.
2790
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002791- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2792
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002793- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2794 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002795
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002796- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2797 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2798
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002799- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2800
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002801- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2802 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2803
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002804- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2805 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2806 functions but callable type objects.
2807
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002808- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002809 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002810 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002811
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002812- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2813 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002814
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002815- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2816 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002817
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002818- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2819 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2820 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2821 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2822
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002823- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2824 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002825
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002826- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2827 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2828 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2829 and __imul__.
2830
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002831- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002832 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2833 is called.
2834
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002835- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2836 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2837 interpreter was compiled.
2838
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002839- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2840 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2841 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002842 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002843 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2844 1, not 2.
2845
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002846- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2847 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2848 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2849 limit.
2850
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002851- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2852 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2853 bug #623464.
2854
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002855- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2856 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2857 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2858 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2859
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002860Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002861-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002862
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002863- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2864
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002865- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2866 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2867 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2868 with Python 2.3a2.
2869
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002870- os.path exposes getctime.
2871
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002872- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002873 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002874 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002875 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002876 unit tests of floating point results.
2877
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002878- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2879 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2880 has been increased.
2881
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002882- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2883 executed.
2884
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002885- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2886 postinstallation script.
2887
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002888- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2889 test the current module.
2890
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002891- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002892 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2893 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2894 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2895 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2896
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002897- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002898 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002899 Ward's Optik package.
2900
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002901- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2902 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2903 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2904 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2905
2906- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2907 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002908 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002909
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002910- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2911 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2912 shelf are binary pickles.
2913
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002914- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2915 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2916
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002917- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2918 modules are iterators now.
2919
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002920- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2921 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2922 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2923 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2924 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2925 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002926
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002927- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2928 with their entity value.
2929
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002930- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2931
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002932- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2933 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002934
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002935- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2936 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002937 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002938
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002939- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2940 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2941 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2942 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2943 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2944 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2945 main():
2946
2947 import locale
2948 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2949
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002950- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2951 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2952
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002953- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2954 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2955 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2956 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2957 to the new standard.
2958
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002959- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2960 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2961 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2962 an extension to the database.
2963
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002964- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2965 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2966 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2967 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002968 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002969
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002970- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002971 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002972
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002973- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2974 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2975 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2976 bounded integers.
2977
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002978- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2979 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2980 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2981 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2982 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2983 in existence.
2984
2985 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2986 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2987 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2988 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2989 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2990 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2991
2992 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2993 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2994 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2995 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2996
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002997- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2998 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2999 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3000
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003001- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3002
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003003- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3004 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3005 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3006 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3007
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003008- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3009 argument.
3010
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003011- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3012 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3013 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3014 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3015 [SF patch 560794].
3016
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003017- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3018 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3019 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003020 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3021 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3022 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003023
3024- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3025 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003026
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003027- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3028 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3029 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3030 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003031
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003032- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3033 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3034 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3035 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3036 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3037
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003038- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003039
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003040- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3041
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003042- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3043 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3044 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3045 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3046 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3047 identical to None.
3048
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003049- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3050 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3051 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3052 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3053 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3054 results now.
3055
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003056- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3057 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3058
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003059- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3060 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3061 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3062 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3063 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3064 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3065 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3066 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3067
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003068- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3069
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003070- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3071 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3072
3073- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3074 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3075 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3076 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3077 and other systems.
3078
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003079- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3080 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3081 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3082 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 +00003083 work well with these.
3084
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003085- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3086
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003087- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003088 connections.
3089
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003090- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3091 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3092 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3093
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003094- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3095 sets
3096
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003097- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3098 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3099 name.
3100
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003101- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3102 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3103 passed in.
3104
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003105- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003106 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003107 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3108 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003109
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003110- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3111
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003112- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3113
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003114- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3115 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3116 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3117
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003118- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3119 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3120 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3121 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003122 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003123
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003124- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003125 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003126 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003127
3128- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3129 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3130 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3131
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003132- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003133 the value of its expression argument.
3134
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003135- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3136 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3137 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3138
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003139- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3140 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3141 skipstone browser was included.
3142
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003143- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3144 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3145
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003146Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003147-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003148
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003149- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3150 names in addition to accepting file names.
3151
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003152- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3153 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3154 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3155 still used and useful.)
3156
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003157- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3158 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3159 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3160 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003161
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003162- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3163 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3164 the generated binary.
3165
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003166Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003167-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003168
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003169- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3170
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003171- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3172 except in the hands of experts.
3173
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003174- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003175 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3176 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3177 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003178
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003179- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3180 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3181 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3182 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3183 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3184 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3185 builds.
3186
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003187- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3188 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3189 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3190 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3191 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3192 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3193 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3194 new type.
3195
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003196- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003197
3198 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3199 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3200 positive infinities.
3201
3202 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3203 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3204 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3205 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3206 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3207 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3208 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3209
3210 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3211
3212 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3213
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003214- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3215 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3216 size of the executable.
3217
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003218- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3219 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3220 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3221 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003222
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003223- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3224
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003225- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3226 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3227 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003228
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003229- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3230 well as Unix.
3231
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003232- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3233 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3234 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3235 modules in the README file for details.
3236
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003237C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003238-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003239
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003240- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3241 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003242 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003243 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003244 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003245
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003246- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3247 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3248 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3249 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3250 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3251 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003252 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003253 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3254 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3255 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3256 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3257 aligned.)
3258
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003259- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3260 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3261 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3262
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003263- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3264 level.
3265
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003266- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3267 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3268 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3269 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3270 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3271
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003272- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3273 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3274 code.
3275
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003276- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3277 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3278 adjusting for negative indices.
3279
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003280- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3281 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3282 object.
3283
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003284- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3285 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3286 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3287
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003288- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3289 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003290
3291- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3292
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003293- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3294 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3295 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3296 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3297
3298- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3299
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003300- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003301
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003302- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003303 without going through the buffer API.
3304
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003305- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003306
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003307- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3308 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3309 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3310 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3311
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003312- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3313 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3314
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003315- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003316 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3317
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003318New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003320
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003321- OpenVMS is now supported.
3322
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003323- AtheOS is now supported.
3324
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003325- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3326
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003327- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3328
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003329Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330-----
3331
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003332- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3333 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3334 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003335
3336Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003337-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003338
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003339- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3340 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3341 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3342 bugs.
3343 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003344 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003345 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3346 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003347 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003348
3349- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003350 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003351
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003352- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3353 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3354
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003355- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3356 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003357 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003358 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3359
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003360- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3361 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3362 use files" uninstall option).
3363
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003364- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3365
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003366- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3367 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3368
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003369- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3370 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3371 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3372
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003373- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3374 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3375 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3376 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3377 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003378 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3379 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3380 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003381
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003382- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003383 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003384 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3385 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3386 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3387 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3388 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3389 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3390 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3391 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3392 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3393 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3394 work around.
3395
3396- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3397 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3398 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3399 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3400 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3401 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3402 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3403 specified with O_CREAT too).
3404
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003405Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406----
3407
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003408- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003409
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003410- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3411 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3412 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3413
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003414- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3415 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3416 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3417
3418- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3419 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3420 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3421 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3422 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3423 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3424 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3425 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003426
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003427- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3428 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3429 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003430
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003431- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3432 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3433 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3434 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3435 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003436
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003437- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3438 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3439 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003440
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003441- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3442 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003443
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003444- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3445 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3446 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3447 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3448 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003449
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003450- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3451 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3452 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3453
3454- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3455 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3456 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003457
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003458- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3459 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3460 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3461 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003462 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003463
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003464- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3465 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003466
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003467- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3468 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003469
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003470- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003471 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003472 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3473 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003474
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003475
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003476What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003477===============================
3478
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3480
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003481Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003483
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003484- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3485 with a custom metaclass.
3486
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003487Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003488-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003489
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003490- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3491 are proxies.
3492
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003493Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003495
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003496- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3497 very short strings.
3498
3499- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3500 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3501 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3502 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3503 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3504
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003505Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003506-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003507
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003508- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3509 close or delete time).
3510
3511- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3512 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3513
3514- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3515
3516- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003517 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003518
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003519Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003521
3522Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003524
3525C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003527
3528New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003530
3531Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003533
3534Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003535-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003536
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003537- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3538
3539- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3540 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3541
3542- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3543 deleted at process exit time.
3544
3545- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3546 in backslash.
3547
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003548Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003549----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003550
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003551- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3552 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3553 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3554
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003555
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003556What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003557===========================
3558
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003559*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3560
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003561Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003562--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003563
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003564- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3565 been extensively updated. See
3566
3567 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3568
3569 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3570
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003571- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3572 deleted!
3573
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003574- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3575 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3576 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3577 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3578 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3579
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003580- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3581
3582 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3583 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3584
3585 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3586 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3587 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3588 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3589 supported anyway.
3590
3591 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3592 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3593
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003594- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3595 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3596 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3597 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3598 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003599
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003600- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3601 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3602 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3603
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003604Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003606
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003607- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3608 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3609 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3610 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3611 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3612 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003613 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3614 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3615 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3616 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003617
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003618- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3619 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3620 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3621
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003622Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003624
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003625- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3626
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003627Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003628-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003629
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003630- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3631 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3632 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3633 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3634 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3635 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3636
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003637- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3638
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003639- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3640
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003641- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3642
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003643- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3644 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3645 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3646
3647- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3648
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003649Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003650-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003651
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003652- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3653 off a search on Google.
3654
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003655Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003656-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003657
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003658- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3659 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3660 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3661 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3662 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3663 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3664 other platforms should do likewise.
3665
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003666- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3667 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3668 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3669
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003670C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003671-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003672
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003673- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3674 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3675 producing key-value pairs.
3676
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003677- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003678 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003679 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3680 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3681 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3682 previously went unchallenged.
3683
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003684New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003686
3687Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003689
3690Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003692
3693Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003695
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003696- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3697 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003698
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003699- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3700 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3701 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3702 home.
3703
3704
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003705What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003706===========================
3707
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003708*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3709
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003710Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003711--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003712
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003713- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3714 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003715
3716 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003717 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003718
3719 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3720 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003721 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003722 This needs to be documented.
3723
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003724- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3725 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3726
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003727- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3728 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3729 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3730
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003731- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3732 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3733
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003734- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3735 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3736 class forbids it).
3737
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003738- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3739 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3740 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3741
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003742- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3743
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003744Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003745-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003746
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003747- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3748 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003749 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003750
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003751- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3752 (like 1 + '').
3753
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003754Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003756
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003757- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3758 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3759 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3760 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003761 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003762 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3763
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003764- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3765 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3766 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3767 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3768
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003769- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3770 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003771 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3772 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3773 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003774
3775- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3776 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003777
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003778- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3779 bytes on its input.
3780
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003781Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003783
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003784- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003785 convenience function.
3786
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003787- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3788 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3789 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003790 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3791 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3792 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3793 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3794 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3795 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003796
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003797- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3798 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3799 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3800 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3801
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003802- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3803 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3804 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3805
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003806- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3807 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3808 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3809 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3810
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003811- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3812 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003814 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3815 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3816 new -l and -e options.
3817
3818- statcache is now deprecated.
3819
3820- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3821 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003822 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003823 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3824 time properly taken into account.
3825
3826- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3827 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3828 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3829 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3830
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003831Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003832-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003833
3834Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003836
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003837- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3838 is built with libdb3 if available.
3839
3840- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3841
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003842C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003844
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003845- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3846 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3847 PySequence_Size().
3848
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003849- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3850
3851- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3852 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3853 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3854
3855- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3856 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3857
3858- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3859 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3860
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003861New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003863
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003864- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3865 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3866
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003867- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3868 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3869
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003870- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3871
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003872Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003874
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003875- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3876 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3877
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003878Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003880
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003881Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003882----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003883
3884- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3885 removed completely in the next release.
3886
3887- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3888 OSX.
3889
3890- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3891 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3892
3893- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3894
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003895
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003896What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003897===========================
3898
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003899*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3900
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003901Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003902--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003903
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003904- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003905 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003906 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003907 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3908 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003909 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3910 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003911 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3912 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003913
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003914- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3915 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3916
3917- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3918 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3919
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003920Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003921-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003922
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003923- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3924 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3925 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3926 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3927 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3928 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3929 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3930 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3931
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003932- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3933 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3934 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3935 example).
3936
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003937- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003938 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003939 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003940 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003941
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003942- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3943 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3944 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003945 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003946
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003947- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3948 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3949 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3950 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3951 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3952 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3953
3954 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3955
3956 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3957
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003958Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003960
3961- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3962
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003963- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3964
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003965- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3966 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003967
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003968- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3969 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3970 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3971 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3972 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3973 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003974 attributes.
3975
3976- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3977 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3978 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003979
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003980- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3981 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3982 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003983
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003984- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3985 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3986 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003987 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3988 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3989
3990- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3991 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003992
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003993Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003995
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003996- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3997 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3998
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003999- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4000 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4001 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4002 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4003
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004004- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4005 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4006 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4007 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4008
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004009 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4010 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4011 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4012 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4013 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4014 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4015 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4016 without losing information).
4017
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004018- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004019 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4020 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4021 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4022 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4023 module).
4024
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004025 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004026 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4027 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4028 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4029 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004030
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004031- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004032 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4033 encoding.
4034
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004035- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4036 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4037
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004039 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4040
4041- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4042 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4043 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4044 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4045
4046- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4047
4048- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4049 ON, and OFF.
4050
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004051- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4052 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4053
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004054Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004056
4057- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4058 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4059 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004060
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004061- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4062 been added: -X and -E.
4063
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004064Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004066
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004067- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4068 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4069
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004070C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004071-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004072
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004073- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4074 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4075 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4076 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4077 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4078
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004079- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4080 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4081 as long) arguments.
4082
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004083- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4084 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4085 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4086 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4087 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4088 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4089
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004090- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4091 input.
4092
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004093New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004095
4096Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004098
4099Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004101
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004102- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4103 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4104 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4105
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004106- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4107 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4108 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004109 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004110
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004111 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4112 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4113 import signal
4114 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004115
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004117 while 1:
4118 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004120 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4121 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4122 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4123 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004124
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004125
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004126What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4127===========================
4128
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4130
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004131Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004133
4134- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4135 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4136 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4137
4138- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4139 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4140 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4141 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4142 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4143 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4144 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004145
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004146- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004147 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004148 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4149 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4150 associate a docstring with a property.
4151
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004152- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4153 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4154 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4155 other built-in object types.
4156
4157- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4158 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4159 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4160 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4161 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4162
4163- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4164 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4165
4166- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4167 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004168 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004169 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4170 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4171 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4172 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4173 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4174
4175- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4176 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4177 class.
4178
4179- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4180 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4181 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4182 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4183
4184- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4185 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4186 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4187 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4188
4189- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4190 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4191
4192- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4193 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4194 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4195 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4196 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004197 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004198 with the same value as s.
4199
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004200- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4201
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004202Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004203----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004204
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004205- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4206
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004207- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4208 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4209 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4210 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4211 objects.
4212
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004213- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4214 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004215 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4216 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4217
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004218- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4219 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4220 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4221
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004222Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004224
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004225- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4226 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4227 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4228 by the instances.
4229
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004230- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4231 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4232 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4233
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004234- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4235 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4236 before the entire comparison is complete.
4237
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004238- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4239 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4240 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4241
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004242- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4243 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4244 getwriter().
4245
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004246- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4247 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4248
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004249- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004250 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4251 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4252
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004253- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4254 iterable object.
4255
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004256- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4257 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004258
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004259- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4260 authentication.
4261
4262- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4263 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004264
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004265- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004266 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4267 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4268 a sample driver.)
4269
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004270Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004272
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004273- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4274 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4275 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4276 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4277 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4278 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4279 kernel has large file support.
4280
4281- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4282 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4283 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4284 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4285 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4286
4287- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4288 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4289 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4290
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004291C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004293
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004294- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4295 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4296
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004297New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004299
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004300- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4301 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4302
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004303Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004305
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004306- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4307 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4308 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4309 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4310 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4311
4312- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4313 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4314 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4315 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4316
4317- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4318 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4319
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004320Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004322
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004323- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004324 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4325 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004326
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004327
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004328What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4329===========================
4330
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004331*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4332
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004333Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004335
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004336- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4337 big to represent as a C double.
4338
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004339- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4340 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4341 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4342 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4343 restriction).
4344
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004345- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4346 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4347 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4348 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4349 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4350
4351 >>> dir([])
4352 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4353 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4354 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4355 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4356 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4357 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4358 'reverse', 'sort']
4359
4360 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4361
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004362- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004363 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4364 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4365 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4366 OverflowError exception.
4367
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004368- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004369 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004370 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4371 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4372 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4373 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4374 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004375 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4377 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4378
4379 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4380 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4381 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4382 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004383
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004384- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004385 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4386 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4387 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4388 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4389 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4390 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4391 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4392 once it is created.
4393
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004394- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4395 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4396 (key, value) pairs.
4397
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004398- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004399 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4400 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4401
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004402- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4403 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4404 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4405 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4406 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004407
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004408- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004409 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4410 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4411
4412 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4413
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004414- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004415 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4416
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004417Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004419
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004420- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004421 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4422 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004423
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004424- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4425 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4426 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4427 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4428 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4429 in this area anymore).
4430
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004431- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4432 threading.Timer.
4433
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004434- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4435 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4436
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004437- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004438 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4439
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004440- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004441 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4442 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4443 converted to Python longs.
4444
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004445- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004446 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4447
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004448- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4449 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4450 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4451
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004452Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004454
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004455- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4456 division operators as per PEP 238.
4457
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004458Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004459-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004460
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004461- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4462 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4463 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4464 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4465
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004466C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004467-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004468
4469- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004470
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004471- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4472 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004473 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004474
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4476 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004477 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004479
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004480- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004481 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4482 module:
4483
4484 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004485
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004486 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4487 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004488
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004489 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4490 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004491
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004492 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4493
4494 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4495
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004496- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004497 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4498 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4499 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004500
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004501New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004503
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004504- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4505 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4506 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4507 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4508 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004509
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004510Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004512
4513Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004515
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004516- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4517 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4518 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4519 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004520 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4521 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4522 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4523 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4524 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004525
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004526- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004527 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4528
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004529
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004530What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4531===========================
4532
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4534
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004535Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004537
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004538- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4539 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4540
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004541- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4542 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4543 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004544
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004545- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4546 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4547 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4548 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004549
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004550- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4551
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004552- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004553
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004554Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004555-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004556
4557- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004558 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004559 the module docstring for details.
4560
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004561Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004563
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004564- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004565 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4566 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4567 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004568
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004569- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4570 Nick Mathewson.
4571
4572Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004573----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004574
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004575- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4576 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4577 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4578 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4579 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4580 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4581 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4582 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4583
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004584- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4585 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4586 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4587 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4588
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004589- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4590 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4591 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4592 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4593 come a long way).
4594
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004595- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4596 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4597 write filters for these warnings).
4598
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004599- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4600 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4601 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4602 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4603 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4604
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004605- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4606 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4607 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4608 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4609 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4610 older distribution.
4611
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004612Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004613-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004614
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004615- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4616 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004617 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004618
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004619- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4620 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4621 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4622
4623- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4624
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004625- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4626
4627- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4628
4629- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4630
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004631- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004632
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004633- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4634
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004635New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004637
4638C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004639-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004640
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004641- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4642 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4643 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4644 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4645 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4646 against buffer overruns.
4647
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004648- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004649 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4650 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004651 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4652 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4653 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4654
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004655- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4656 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4657 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4658 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4659 deprecated.
4660
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004661Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004663
4664- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4665 relevant is found.
4666
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004667
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004668What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004669===========================
4670
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4672
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004673Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004674----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004675
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004676- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4677 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4678 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4679 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4680 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4681 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4682 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4683 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004684 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004685 repaired.
4686
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004687- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004688 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004689 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4690 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4691 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4692 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4693 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4694 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4695 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4696 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4697
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004698- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4699 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4700 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4701 leading BMO character).
4702
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004703- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4704 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4705 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4706
4707 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4708 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4709 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004710
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004711 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4712 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4713 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4714 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4715 for various simple to use conversions.
4716
4717 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4718 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4719
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4721 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4722 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4723 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4724 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4725 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4726 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4727 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4728 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4729 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4730 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4731 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4732 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4733 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4734 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004735
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004736- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4737 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4738 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004739 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004740 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004741
4742 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004743 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4744 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4745 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4746 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4747 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004748 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4749 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004750
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004751 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4752 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4753 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004754 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004755
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004756- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4757 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4758 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4759 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4760 floating arithmetic,
4761
4762 x = 9007199254740992.0
4763 print long(x)
4764
4765 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4766 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4767 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4768 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4769 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4770 functions are of good quality).
4771
4772 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4773 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4774 algorithms to break.
4775
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004776- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4777 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4778 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4779 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4780 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4781 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4782 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4783 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4784 order.
4785
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004786- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4787 operation along the most common code paths.
4788
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004789- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4790 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4791
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004792- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4793 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4794 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4795 {}.update(UserDict())
4796
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004797- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4798 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4799 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4800 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4801 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4802 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4803 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4804 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4805
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004806- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004807 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004809 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004810 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4811 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004812 join() method of strings
4813 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004814 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4815 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004817 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004818
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004819- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4820 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4821
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004822- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4823 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4824
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004825- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4826 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4827 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4828 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4829
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004830- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4831 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004832 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004833 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4834 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004835
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004836- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4837
4838
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004839Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004840-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004841
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004842- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004843 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004844 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4845 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4846
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004847- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4848 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4849
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004850- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4851 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4852 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4853 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4854
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004855- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4856 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4857 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4858
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004859- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4860
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004861- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4862
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004863- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4864 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4865 that are still imported into string.py).
4866
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004867- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4868
4869- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4870 Now it does.
4871
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004872- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4873
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004874- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4875 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4876 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4877 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4878 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004879 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4880 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004881
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004882- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4883 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4884 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4885 'help(object)'.
4886
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004887Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004888-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004889
4890- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004891 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004892 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4893 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4894
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004895- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004896 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4897 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004898
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004899C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004901
4902- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4903 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004904
4905----
4906
4907**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**