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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000015- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000016 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000017
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000018- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
19 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
20 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
21 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
22 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
23 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
24 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
25 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
26 destroyed.
27
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000028- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
29 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
30 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
31 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
32 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
33 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
34 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
35 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
36
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000037- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
38 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
39 character other than a space.
40
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000041- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
42 by the function object or by the method object, the function
43 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
44 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
45 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
46 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
47 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
48 attributes with the same name.
49
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000050- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
51 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
52 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
53 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
54 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
55 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
56 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
57 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
58 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
59 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
60 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
61 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
62 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
63 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000064
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000065- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
66 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
67 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
68 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
69 This has been repaired.
70
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000071- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
72
73- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
74
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000075- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
76 over a sequence.
77
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +000078- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
79 from any iterable.
80
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000081- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
82
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000083- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
84 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
85 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
86 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
87 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
88 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
89 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
90 records with equal keys is unchanged).
91
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000092- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
93 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
94 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
95
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000096- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
97 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
98 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
99 freelist.
100
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000101- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
102 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
103
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000104- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
105 number.
106
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000107- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
108 a TypeError exception.
109
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000110- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
111 820195.
112
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000113- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
114 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
115 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
116
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000117- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
118 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
119 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000120
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000121Extension modules
122-----------------
123
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000124- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
125 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
126 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
127 other functions that expect a function argument.
128
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000129- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
130
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000131- os.getsid was added.
132
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000133- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
134 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
135 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
136
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000137- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
138
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000139- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
140
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000141- readline.clear_history was added.
142
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000143- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
144
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000145- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
146
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000147- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
148
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000149- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
150
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000151- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
152
153- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
154
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000155- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
156
157- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
158
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000159- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
160 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
161 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
162
163- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
164 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
165 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
166 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
167 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
168 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
169 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
170
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000171- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
172 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
173 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
174 the Unix uniq filter.
175
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000176- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
177 iterators from a single iterable.
178
179- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
180 of raising a TypeError exception.
181
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000182Library
183-------
184
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000185- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
186 decoding standards.
187
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000188- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
189 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
190 called for all requests.
191
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000192- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
193 they are passed to the compiler.
194
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000195- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
196 indent, width and depth.
197
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000198- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
199 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
200
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000201- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
202 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
203
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000204- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
205
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000206- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
207
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000208- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
209
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000210- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
211 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
212
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000213- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
214 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000215
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000216- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
217 a string).
218
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000219- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
220
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000221- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
222
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000223- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
224
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000225- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
226
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000227- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
228 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
229 list of fieldnames.
230
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000231- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
232 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
233
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000234- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
235
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000236- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
237 empty lists.
238
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000239- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
240 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
241 and shelves.
242
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000243- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
244 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
245
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000246- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000247 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
248 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000249
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000250- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
251 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000252 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000253
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000254- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000255 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
256 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
257
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000258- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
259 and removed in Py2.4.
260
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000261- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
262
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000263Tools/Demos
264-----------
265
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000266- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
267
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000268- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
269 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
270 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
271 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
272
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000273- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
274
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000275- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
276 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
277 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
278 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
279 now.
280
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000281- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
282 in effect
283
284- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
285 C-c C-h
286
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000287- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
288 -d option was given.
289
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000290Build
291-----
292
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000293- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
294
295- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
296 (see PEP 11).
297
298- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
299 sizeof(char) must be 1.
300
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000301C API
302-----
303
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000304- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
305 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
306 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
307 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
308 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
309
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000310- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
311 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
312 about 10% faster.
313
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000314- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
315 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
316
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000317- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
318 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
319 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
320 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
321
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000322New platforms
323-------------
324
325Tests
326-----
327
328Windows
329-------
330
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000331- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
332 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
333 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
334 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
335
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000336- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
337 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
338 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
339
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000340Mac
341----
342
343
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000344What's New in Python 2.3 final?
345===============================
346
347*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
348
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000349IDLE
350----
351
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000352- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
353 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
354 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
355 context-menu actions.
356
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000357- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
358 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
359 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
360 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
361 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
362 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
363 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
364 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
365 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
366
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000367
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000368What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
369=============================================
370
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000371*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000372
373Core and builtins
374-----------------
375
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000376- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000377 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000378 comment at the end are still unsupported.
379
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000380Extension modules
381-----------------
382
383- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
384 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
385 than once. This has been fixed.
386
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000387- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
388 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
389 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
390 call.
391
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000392- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
393
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000394Library
395-------
396
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000397- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
398 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
399
400- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
401 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
402 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
403 restored.
404
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000405IDLE
406----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000407
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000408- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000409
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000410Build
411-----
412
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000413- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
414 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
415
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000416C API
417-----
418
419Windows
420-------
421
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000422- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
423 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
424
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000425- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
426
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000427Mac
428---
429
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000430- Various fixes to pimp.
431
432- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
433
434- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
435 more problems than it solves.
436
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000437
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000438What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
439=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000440
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000441*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
442
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000443Core and builtins
444-----------------
445
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000446- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
447 by sys.setcheckinterval().
448
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000449- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
450 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000451 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000452
453- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
454 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
455 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000456 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000457
458- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
459 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000460
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000461- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
462 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
463 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
464
465- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000466 770247.
467
468- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000469
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000470Extension modules
471-----------------
472
473- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
474 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
475
476- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
477
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000478- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
479
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000480- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
481 contained within the _strptime module.
482
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000483- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
484 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
485
486- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000487 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
488
489- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
490 the find_class attribute, if present.
491
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000492- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000493
494 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
495 (SF bug 763298).
496
497 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000498 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
499 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
500 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000501
502 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
503
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000504Library
505-------
506
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000507- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
508
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000509- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
510 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
511 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
512 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
513 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
514 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
515 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
516 or Tester().
517
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000518- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
519 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
520 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
521 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
522 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
523 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
524 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
525 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
526 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000527
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000528 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000529
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000530- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
531 weren't before was an oversight.
532
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000533- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
534 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
535
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000536- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
537 when there are no lines.
538
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000539- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
540 which could occur with Tk 8.4
541
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000542- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
543 to child processes.
544
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000545- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
546
547- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
548
549- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
550 xmlrpclib.
551
552- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
553 responses.
554
555- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
556 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
557
558- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
559 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
560 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
561
562- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
563 used as patterns.
564
565- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
566 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
567 than Tk 8.3.
568
569- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
570
571- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000572
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000573Tools/Demos
574-----------
575
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000576- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
577
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000578- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
579
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000580- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000581
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000582Build
583-----
584
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000585- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
586
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000587- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
588
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000589- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
590 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000591
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000592- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
593 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
594 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000595
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000596C API
597-----
598
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000599- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
600 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
601
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000602Windows
603-------
604
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000605- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
606 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
607 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
608 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
609 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
610 Python exception ::
611
612 thread.error: can't start new thread
613
614 is raised now.
615
616- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
617 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
618 instead of from DLL teardown.
619
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000620Mac
621---
622
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000623- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000624 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000625 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
626 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
627 the executable in the bundle.
628
629- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000630
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000631- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
632
633- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
634 on Panther.
635
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000636What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
637================================
638
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000639*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000640
641Core and builtins
642-----------------
643
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000644- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
645 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
646 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
647 with the -i option.
648
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000649- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
650 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
651
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000652- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
653 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
654
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000655- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
656 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
657 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
658 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
659 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
660 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
661 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
662 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
663 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
664 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
665 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
666 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
667 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000668
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000669- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
670 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
671 embedded in a lambda expression.
672
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000673- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
674 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
675 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
676 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
677 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
678
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000679- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
680 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
681 matches the restriction on classic classes.
682
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000683- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
684 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
685
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000686- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
687 It's writable again.
688
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000689- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
690 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
691 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000692 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000693
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000694- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
695 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
696 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
697
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000698Extension modules
699-----------------
700
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000701- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
702 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
703
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000704- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
705 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
706 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
707 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
708
709- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
710 collection.
711
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000712- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
713 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
714 unique within a single program run.
715
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000716- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
717 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
718
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000719- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
720 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
721
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000722- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
723 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000724
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000725- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
726
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000727- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
728 Fixes SF bug #730685.
729
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000730- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
731 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
732 for many BSD-derived systems.
733
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000734
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000735Library
736-------
737
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000738- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
739 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
740 primary ones:
741
742 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
743 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
744 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
745
746 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
747 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
748 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
749 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
750 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
751 framework features (which doctest lacks).
752
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000753- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
754 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
755 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
756 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
757 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
758 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
759 argument.
760
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000761- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
762 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
763 in the archive.
764
765- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
766 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
767
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000768- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
769 569574).
770
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000771- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
772 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
773 no more.
774
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000775- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
776 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
777 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
778 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
779 code coverage.
780
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000781- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
782 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
783 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000784 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
785 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000786
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000787- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
788 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
789 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000790 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000791
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000792- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
793
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000794- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
795 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
796 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
797 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
798
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000799- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
800 handling.
801
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000802- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
803 __doc__ of data descriptors.
804
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000805- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
806 in socket.py.
807
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000808- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
809
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000810- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
811 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
812 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
813 opener with proxy support.
814
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000815- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
816
817- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
818
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000819Tools/Demos
820-----------
821
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000822- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
823
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000824- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
825
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000826- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
827 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000828
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000829- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
830 files.
831
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000832Build
833-----
834
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000835- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000836 different root directory.
837
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000838C API
839-----
840
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000841- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
842 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
843 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
844 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
845 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
846 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
847 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
848 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
849 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
850 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
851
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000852- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
853 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
854 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
855 from Python.
856
857
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000858New platforms
859-------------
860
861None this time.
862
863Tests
864-----
865
866- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
867 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
868
869Windows
870-------
871
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000872- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
873
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000874- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
875 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
876 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
877 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
878 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
879 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
880 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
881 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
882 that's what it's for.
883
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000884Mac
885---
886
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000887- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
888 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
889 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
890 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000891- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
892 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
893- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000894
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000895SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
896------------------------------------
897
898430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
899598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
900622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
901661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
902683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
903697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
904713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
905724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
906727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
907729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
908730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
909731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
910732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
911733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
912735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
913740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
914744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
915745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
916747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
917749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
918751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
919753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
920755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
921757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
922760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
923
924
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000925What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
926================================
927
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000928*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000929
930Core and builtins
931-----------------
932
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000933- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
934 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
935
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000936- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
937 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
938 and cannot be strings).
939
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000940- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
941 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
942 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
943 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
944
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000945- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
946 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
947 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
948 Python itself.
949
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000950- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
951 the referenced object, if it has one.
952
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000953- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
954 the thread started at
955 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
956
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000957- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
958 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
959 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
960 placed on a list index.
961
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000962- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
963 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
964 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
965 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
966
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000967- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
968 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
969 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
970 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
971 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
972 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
973 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
974
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000975- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
976 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
977 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
978 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
979 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
980
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000981- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
982 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000983
984- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
985 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
986 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
987 #693195.)
988
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000989- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
990 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000991
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000992- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000993 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000994 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
995 interpreter executions, would fail.
996
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000997- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000998 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000999 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001000
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001001Extension modules
1002-----------------
1003
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001004- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1005 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1006 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1007 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1008
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001009- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1010 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1011
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001012- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1013 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1014 and Greg Chapman.)
1015
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001016- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1017 recursively.
1018
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001019- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001020 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1021 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1022 leaks.
1023
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001024- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1025
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001026- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1027 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1028 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1029 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1030 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1031 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1032 #705836.
1033
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001034- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001035 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1036
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001037- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1038 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1039 See SF bug #692416.
1040
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001041- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1042 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1043
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001044- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1045 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1046 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001047
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001048- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001049 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1050 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1051
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001052- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1053 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1054 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1055 timeouts to work properly.
1056
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001057Library
1058-------
1059
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001060- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1061 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1062 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1063 future release.
1064
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001065- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1066 for querying platform dependent features.
1067
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001068- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001069
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001070- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1071 pickle protocol versions.
1072
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001073- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1074 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1075 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1076
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001077- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1078
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001079- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1080 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1081 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1082 modules.
1083
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001084- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1085 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1086 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1087
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001088- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1089 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1090
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001091- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1092 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1093 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1094
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001095- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001096 MS Office extensions.
1097
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001098- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1099 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1100
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001101- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1102 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1103
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001104- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1105 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1106 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1107 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1108 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1109 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1110
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001111- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1112 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1113 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001114
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001115- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1116 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1117 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1118
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001119- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1120
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001121- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1122 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1123 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1124
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001125Tools/Demos
1126-----------
1127
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001128- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1129 See the module docstring for details.
1130
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001131Build
1132-----
1133
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001134- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1135 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001136
1137C API
1138-----
1139
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001140- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1141
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001142- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1143 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1144 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1145
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001146- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1147 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001148
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001149 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1150 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1151 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001152
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001153- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001154 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1155
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001156- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1157 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1158 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001159
1160New platforms
1161-------------
1162
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001163None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001164
1165Tests
1166-----
1167
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001168- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1169 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001170
1171Windows
1172-------
1173
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001174- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1175 function.
1176
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001177- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1178 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001179
1180Mac
1181---
1182
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001183- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1184 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001185
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001186- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1187 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001188
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001189- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1190 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1191 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001192
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001193- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001194 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1195 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001196
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001197- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1198 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001199
1200
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001201What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1202=================================
1203
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001204*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001205
1206Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001207-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001208
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001209- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1210 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1211 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1212
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001213- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1214 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1215 (SF patch #664376.)
1216
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001217- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1218 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1219 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1220 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1221 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1222 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001223 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001224
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001225- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1226 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1227 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1228 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001229 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001230
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001231- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1232 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1233 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1234 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1235 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1236 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1237 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1238 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1239 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1240 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1241 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1242
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001243- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1244 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1245 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1246 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1247 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1248 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1249
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001250- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1251 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1252
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001253- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1254 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1255 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1256 case.)
1257
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001258- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1259 passed as unicode strings.
1260
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001261- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1262 See SF bug #683467.
1263
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001264- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1265 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1266
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001267- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1268
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001269- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1270
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001271- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1272 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1273 arguments.
1274
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001275- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1276 See SF bug #667147.
1277
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001278- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001279 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001280 See SF bug #676155.
1281
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001282- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001283 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001284 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1285 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1286 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1287 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1288 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1289 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001290
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001291Extension modules
1292-----------------
1293
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001294- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1295 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1296 tp_as_number pointer.
1297
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001298- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1299 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1300 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1301 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1302 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1303
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001304- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1305
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001306- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1307
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001308- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001309 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001310 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1311 patch #678531.)
1312
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001313- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1314 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1315
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001316- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1317 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1318
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001319- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1320
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001321- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1322 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1323 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1324
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001325- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1326
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001327- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1328 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1329
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001330- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001331
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001332- datetime changes:
1333
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001334 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1335
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001336 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1337 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1338 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1339 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1340 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1341 now.
1342
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001343 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001344 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1345 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001346
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001347 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001348 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001349 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1350 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1351 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1352 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001353
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001354 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1355 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1356 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001357 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1358
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001359 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1360 by a later example coded by Guido.
1361
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001362 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001363 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1364 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1365 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001366 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1367 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1368
1369 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1370 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1371 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1372 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1373 tzinfo subclass instance.
1374
1375 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1376 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1377 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1378 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1379 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1380 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1381 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1382 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001383
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001384 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1385 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1386 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1387 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1388 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001389 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1390
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001391 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001392
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001393 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1394 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1395 as a naive datetime object.
1396
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001397 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1398 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1399 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1400
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001401 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1402 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1403 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1404 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1405 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1406 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1407 comparison.
1408
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001409 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1410 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1411 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1412 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001413 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001414
1415 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001416
1417 and ::
1418
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001419 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1420
1421 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1422 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1423 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1424 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1425
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001426 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1427 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1428 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1429 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1430 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1431
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001432 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1433 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001434 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1435 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001436
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001437Library
1438-------
1439
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001440- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1441 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1442
1443- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1444 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1445 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1446 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1447 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1448 See PEP 307 for details.
1449
1450- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1451 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1452
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001453- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1454 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001455 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001456 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1457 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001458 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001459
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001460- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1461 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1462
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001463- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1464 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1465 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1466
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001467- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1468
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001469- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1470 exception.
1471
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001472- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1473 class.
1474
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001475- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1476 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1477 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1478
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001479- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1480 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1481
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001482- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001483 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1484 See SF bug #659228.
1485
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001486- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1487 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1488 See SF patch #651082.
1489
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001490- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001491
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001492- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1493 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1494
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001495- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001496 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001497
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001498- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1499 DOS paths from other platforms.
1500
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001501Tools/Demos
1502-----------
1503
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001504- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1505 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1506 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1507 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1508 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1509 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1510 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1511 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1512 example:
1513
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001514 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1515 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001516
1517 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1518
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001519
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001520Build
1521-----
1522
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001523- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1524 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1525 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001526 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1527
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001528 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1529
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001530- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1531 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1532 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1533 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1534 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1535 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1536 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1537 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1538 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1539
1540- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1541 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1542 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1543 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1544
1545- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1546 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1547
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001548C API
1549-----
1550
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001551- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1552 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001553
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001554- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1555 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1556 tp_as_number pointer.
1557
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001558- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1559 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1560 (SF #681367)
1561
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001562- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1563 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1564 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1565 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001566
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001567Tests
1568-----
1569
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001570- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001571 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1572 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1573 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1574 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1575 pydoc.)
1576
1577- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1578
1579- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001580
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001581Windows
1582-------
1583
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001584- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1585 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1586 time).
1587
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001588- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1589 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1590
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001591- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1592 release without strong cryptography.
1593
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001594- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001595 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001596
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001597- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1598 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1599
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001600Mac
1601---
1602
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001603- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1604 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001605
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001606- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1607 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1608 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001609
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001610- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1611 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001612
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001613- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1614 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1615 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1616 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001617
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001618- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001619 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1620 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1621 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001622
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001623
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001624What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001625=================================
1626
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001627*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001628
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001629Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001630--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001631
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001632- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1633
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001634- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1635 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001636 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001637 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001638 a different meaning than before.
1639
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001640- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001641 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001642 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001643
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001644- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001645 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001646 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001647
1648- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1649 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1650 and deallocation.
1651
1652- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1653 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1654
1655- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1656 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1657 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1658 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1659 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1660
1661- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1662 now detected by the garbage collector.
1663
1664- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1665 [SF bug 519621]
1666
1667- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1668 identifier.
1669
1670- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1671 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1672 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1673 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1674 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1675 [SF bug 563060]
1676
1677- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1678 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1679 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1680 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1681 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1682
1683- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1684 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1685 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1686
1687- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1688
1689- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1690 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1691 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1692 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1693 state of the slots would be lost.)
1694
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001695Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001696-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001697
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001698- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001699 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1700 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1701 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1702 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001703 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1704 Jython 2.1.
1705
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001706- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001707 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001708 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1709 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1710 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1711 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1712 these, see PEP 302.
1713
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001714- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1715 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1716 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1717
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001718- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1719 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1720 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1721
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001722- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1723 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1724 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1725
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001726- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1727 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1728 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1729 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1730 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1731 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1732 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1733 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1734 releases or implementations.
1735
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001736- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001737 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1738 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001739
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001740- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1741 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1742
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001743- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1744 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1745 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1746
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001747- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1748 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1749
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001750- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1751 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001752 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1753 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001754
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001755- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1756 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1757 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1758 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1759 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1760
1761 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1762 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1763 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1764 pattern.
1765
1766 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1767 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1768 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1769 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1770
1771 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1772 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1773 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1774 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1775 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1776 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1777
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001778- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1779 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1780 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1781 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1782 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1783 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1784 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1785 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001786
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001787- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1788 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1789 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1790 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1791 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001792 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1793 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1794 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1795 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1796 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1797 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1798 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001799
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001800- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1801 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1802
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001803- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1804 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1805 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1806 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1807 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1808 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1809 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1810 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1811 to Zack Weinberg!
1812
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001813- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1814 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1815 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1816 type. This has been fixed now.
1817
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001818- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1819 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1820 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1821
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001822- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1823 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1824 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1825 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1826 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1827 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1828 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1829 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001830 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001831
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001832- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1833 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1834 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001835
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001836- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1837 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1838 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1839 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1840 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1841 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1842 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1843 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001844 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001845 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1846 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1847
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001848- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1849 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1850 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1851 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1852 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1853 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1854 this.)
1855
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001856- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1857 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001858 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001859 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001860 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1861 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001862 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1863 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001864
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001865- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1866 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1867 currently running.
1868
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001869- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1870 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1871 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1872 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1873
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001874- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1875 as directory names.
1876
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001877- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1878 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1879
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001880- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1881 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1882
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001883- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001884 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1885 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001886
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001887- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1888 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1889 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1890 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1891 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1892
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001893- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1894 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1895 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1896 removed.
1897
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001898- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1899 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1900 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1901
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001902- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1903 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1904 to __debug__.
1905
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001906- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1907 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1908 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1909
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001910- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1911 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1912 deprecated now.
1913
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001914- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1915 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1916 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001917
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001918- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1919 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1920 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1921 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1922 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001923
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001924- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1925 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1926
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001927- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1928 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1929 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001930 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001931 is backward compatible.
1932
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001933- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1934 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1935 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1936 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1937 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1938
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001939- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1940 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1941 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1942 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1943 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1944 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001945
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001946- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1947 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1948
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001949- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1950 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1951
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001952- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1953 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1954 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1955 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1956 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1957
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001958- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1959 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1960 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1961
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001962- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001963 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1964
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001965- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1966 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1967 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001968
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001969- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1970 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1971
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001972- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1973 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1974 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1975
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001976- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1977
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001978Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001979-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001980
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001981- Added three operators to the operator module:
1982 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1983 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1984 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1985
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001986- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1987
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001988- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1989 archives.
1990
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001991- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1992 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1993 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1994
1995 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1996
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001997- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1998 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1999 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002000 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002001
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002002- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2003 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2004 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2005 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002006 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2007 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2008 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2009 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002010
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002011- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2012 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002013
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002014- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2015
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002016- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2017 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2018
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002019- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2020 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2021 supported.
2022
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002023- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2024
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002025- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2026 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002027
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002028- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2029 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2030
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002031- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2032
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002033- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2034 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2035
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002036- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2037 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2038 functions but callable type objects.
2039
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002040- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002041 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002042 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002043
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002044- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2045 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002046
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002047- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2048 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002049
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002050- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2051 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2052 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2053 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2054
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002055- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2056 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002057
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002058- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2059 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2060 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2061 and __imul__.
2062
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002063- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002064 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2065 is called.
2066
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002067- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2068 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2069 interpreter was compiled.
2070
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002071- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2072 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2073 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002074 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002075 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2076 1, not 2.
2077
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002078- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2079 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2080 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2081 limit.
2082
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002083- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2084 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2085 bug #623464.
2086
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002087- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2088 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2089 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2090 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2091
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002092Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002093-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002094
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002095- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2096
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002097- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2098 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2099 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2100 with Python 2.3a2.
2101
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002102- os.path exposes getctime.
2103
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002104- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002105 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002106 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002107 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002108 unit tests of floating point results.
2109
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002110- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2111 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2112 has been increased.
2113
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002114- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2115 executed.
2116
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002117- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2118 postinstallation script.
2119
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002120- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2121 test the current module.
2122
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002123- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002124 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2125 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2126 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2127 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2128
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002129- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002130 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002131 Ward's Optik package.
2132
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002133- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2134 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2135 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2136 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2137
2138- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2139 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002140 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002141
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002142- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2143 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2144 shelf are binary pickles.
2145
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002146- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2147 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2148
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002149- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2150 modules are iterators now.
2151
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002152- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2153 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2154 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2155 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2156 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2157 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002158
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002159- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2160 with their entity value.
2161
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002162- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2163
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002164- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2165 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002166
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002167- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2168 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002169 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002170
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002171- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2172 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2173 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2174 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2175 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2176 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2177 main():
2178
2179 import locale
2180 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2181
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002182- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2183 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2184
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002185- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2186 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2187 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2188 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2189 to the new standard.
2190
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002191- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2192 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2193 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2194 an extension to the database.
2195
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002196- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2197 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2198 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2199 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002200 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002201
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002202- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002203 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002204
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002205- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2206 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2207 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2208 bounded integers.
2209
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002210- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2211 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2212 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2213 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2214 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2215 in existence.
2216
2217 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2218 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2219 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2220 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2221 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2222 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2223
2224 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2225 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2226 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2227 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2228
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002229- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2230 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2231 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2232
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002233- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2234
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002235- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2236 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2237 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2238 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2239
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002240- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2241 argument.
2242
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002243- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2244 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2245 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2246 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2247 [SF patch 560794].
2248
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002249- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2250 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2251 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002252 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2253 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2254 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002255
2256- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2257 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002258
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002259- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2260 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2261 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2262 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002263
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002264- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2265 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2266 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2267 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2268 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2269
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002270- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002271
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002272- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2273
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002274- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2275 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2276 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2277 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2278 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2279 identical to None.
2280
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002281- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2282 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2283 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2284 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2285 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2286 results now.
2287
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002288- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2289 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2290
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002291- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2292 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2293 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2294 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2295 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2296 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2297 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2298 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2299
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002300- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2301
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002302- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2303 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2304
2305- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2306 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2307 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2308 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2309 and other systems.
2310
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002311- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2312 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2313 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2314 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 +00002315 work well with these.
2316
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002317- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2318
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002319- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002320 connections.
2321
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002322- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2323 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2324 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2325
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002326- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2327 sets
2328
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002329- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2330 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2331 name.
2332
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002333- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2334 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2335 passed in.
2336
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002337- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002338 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002339 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2340 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002341
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002342- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2343
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002344- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2345
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002346- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2347 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2348 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2349
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002350- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2351 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2352 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2353 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002354 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002355
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002356- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002357 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002358 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002359
2360- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2361 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2362 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2363
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002364- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002365 the value of its expression argument.
2366
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002367- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2368 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2369 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2370
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002371- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2372 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2373 skipstone browser was included.
2374
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002375- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2376 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2377
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002378Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002379-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002380
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002381- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2382 names in addition to accepting file names.
2383
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002384- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2385 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2386 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2387 still used and useful.)
2388
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002389- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2390 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2391 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2392 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002393
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002394- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2395 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2396 the generated binary.
2397
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002398Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002399-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002400
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002401- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2402
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002403- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2404 except in the hands of experts.
2405
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002406- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002407 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2408 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2409 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002410
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002411- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2412 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2413 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2414 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2415 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2416 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2417 builds.
2418
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002419- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2420 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2421 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2422 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2423 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2424 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2425 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2426 new type.
2427
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002428- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002429
2430 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2431 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2432 positive infinities.
2433
2434 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2435 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2436 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2437 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2438 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2439 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2440 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2441
2442 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2443
2444 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2445
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002446- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2447 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2448 size of the executable.
2449
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002450- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2451 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2452 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2453 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002454
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002455- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2456
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002457- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2458 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2459 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002460
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002461- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2462 well as Unix.
2463
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002464- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2465 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2466 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2467 modules in the README file for details.
2468
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002469C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002470-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002471
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002472- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2473 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002474 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002475 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002476 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002477
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002478- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2479 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2480 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2481 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2482 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2483 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002484 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002485 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2486 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2487 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2488 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2489 aligned.)
2490
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002491- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2492 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2493 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2494
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002495- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2496 level.
2497
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002498- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2499 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2500 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2501 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2502 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2503
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002504- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2505 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2506 code.
2507
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002508- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2509 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2510 adjusting for negative indices.
2511
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002512- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2513 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2514 object.
2515
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002516- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2517 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2518 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2519
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002520- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2521 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002522
2523- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2524
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002525- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2526 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2527 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2528 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2529
2530- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2531
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002532- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002533
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002534- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002535 without going through the buffer API.
2536
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002537- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002538
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002539- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2540 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2541 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2542 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2543
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002544- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2545 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2546
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002547- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002548 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2549
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002550New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002551-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002552
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002553- OpenVMS is now supported.
2554
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002555- AtheOS is now supported.
2556
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002557- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2558
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002559- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2560
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002561Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002562-----
2563
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002564- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2565 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2566 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002567
2568Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002569-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002570
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002571- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2572 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2573 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2574 bugs.
2575 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002576 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002577 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2578 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002579 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002580
2581- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002582 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002583
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002584- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2585 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2586
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002587- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2588 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002589 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002590 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2591
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002592- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2593 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2594 use files" uninstall option).
2595
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002596- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2597
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002598- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2599 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2600
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002601- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2602 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2603 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2604
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002605- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2606 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2607 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2608 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2609 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002610 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2611 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2612 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002613
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002614- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002615 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002616 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2617 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2618 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2619 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2620 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2621 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2622 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2623 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2624 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2625 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2626 work around.
2627
2628- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2629 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2630 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2631 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2632 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2633 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2634 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2635 specified with O_CREAT too).
2636
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002637Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002638----
2639
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002640- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002641
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002642- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2643 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2644 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2645
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002646- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2647 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2648 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2649
2650- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2651 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2652 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2653 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2654 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2655 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2656 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2657 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002658
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002659- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2660 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2661 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002662
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002663- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2664 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2665 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2666 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2667 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002668
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002669- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2670 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2671 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002672
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002673- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2674 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002675
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002676- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2677 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2678 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2679 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2680 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002681
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002682- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2683 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2684 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2685
2686- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2687 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2688 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002689
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002690- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2691 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2692 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2693 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002694 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002695
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002696- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2697 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002698
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002699- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2700 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002701
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002702- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002703 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002704 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2705 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002706
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002707
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002708What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002709===============================
2710
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002711*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2712
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002713Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002714--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002715
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002716- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2717 with a custom metaclass.
2718
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002719Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002720-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002721
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002722- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2723 are proxies.
2724
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002725Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002726-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002727
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002728- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2729 very short strings.
2730
2731- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2732 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2733 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2734 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2735 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2736
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002737Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002738-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002739
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002740- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2741 close or delete time).
2742
2743- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2744 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2745
2746- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2747
2748- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002749 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002750
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002751Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002752-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002753
2754Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002755-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002756
2757C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002758-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002759
2760New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002761-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002762
2763Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002764-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002765
2766Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002767-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002768
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002769- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2770
2771- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2772 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2773
2774- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2775 deleted at process exit time.
2776
2777- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2778 in backslash.
2779
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002780Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002782
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002783- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2784 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2785 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2786
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002787
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002788What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002789===========================
2790
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002791*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2792
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002793Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002794--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002795
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002796- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2797 been extensively updated. See
2798
2799 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2800
2801 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2802
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002803- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2804 deleted!
2805
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002806- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2807 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2808 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2809 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2810 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2811
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002812- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2813
2814 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2815 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2816
2817 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2818 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2819 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2820 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2821 supported anyway.
2822
2823 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2824 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2825
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002826- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2827 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2828 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2829 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2830 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002831
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002832- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2833 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2834 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2835
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002836Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002837-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002838
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002839- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2840 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2841 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2842 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2843 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2844 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002845 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2846 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2847 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2848 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002849
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002850- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2851 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2852 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2853
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002854Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002855-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002856
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002857- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2858
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002859Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002860-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002861
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002862- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2863 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2864 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2865 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2866 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2867 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2868
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002869- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2870
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002871- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2872
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002873- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2874
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002875- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2876 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2877 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2878
2879- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2880
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002881Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002882-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002883
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002884- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2885 off a search on Google.
2886
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002887Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002888-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002889
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002890- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2891 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2892 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2893 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2894 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2895 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2896 other platforms should do likewise.
2897
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002898- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2899 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2900 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2901
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002902C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002903-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002904
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002905- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2906 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2907 producing key-value pairs.
2908
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002909- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002910 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002911 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2912 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2913 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2914 previously went unchallenged.
2915
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002916New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002917-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002918
2919Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002920-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002921
2922Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002923-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002924
2925Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002926----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002927
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002928- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2929 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002930
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002931- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2932 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2933 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2934 home.
2935
2936
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002937What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002938===========================
2939
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002940*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2941
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002942Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002943--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002944
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002945- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2946 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002947
2948 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002949 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002950
2951 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2952 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002953 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002954 This needs to be documented.
2955
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002956- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2957 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2958
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002959- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2960 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2961 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2962
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002963- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2964 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2965
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002966- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2967 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2968 class forbids it).
2969
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002970- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2971 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2972 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2973
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002974- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2975
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002976Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002977-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002978
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002979- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2980 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002981 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002982
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002983- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2984 (like 1 + '').
2985
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002986Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002987-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002988
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002989- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2990 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2991 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2992 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002993 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002994 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2995
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002996- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2997 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2998 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2999 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3000
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003001- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3002 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003003 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3004 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3005 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003006
3007- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3008 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003009
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003010- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3011 bytes on its input.
3012
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003013Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003015
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003016- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003017 convenience function.
3018
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003019- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3020 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3021 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003022 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3023 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3024 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3025 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3026 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3027 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003028
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003029- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3030 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3031 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3032 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3033
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003034- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3035 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3036 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3037
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003038- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3039 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3040 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3041 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3042
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003043- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3044 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003045 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003046 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3047 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3048 new -l and -e options.
3049
3050- statcache is now deprecated.
3051
3052- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3053 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003055 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3056 time properly taken into account.
3057
3058- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3059 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3060 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3061 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3062
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003063Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003064-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003065
3066Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003067-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003068
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003069- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3070 is built with libdb3 if available.
3071
3072- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3073
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003074C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003075-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003076
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003077- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3078 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3079 PySequence_Size().
3080
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003081- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3082
3083- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3084 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3085 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3086
3087- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3088 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3089
3090- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3091 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3092
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003093New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003094-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003095
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003096- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3097 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3098
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003099- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3100 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3101
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003102- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3103
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003104Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003105-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003106
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003107- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3108 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3109
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003110Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003111-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003112
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003113Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003114----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003115
3116- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3117 removed completely in the next release.
3118
3119- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3120 OSX.
3121
3122- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3123 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3124
3125- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3126
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003127
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003128What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003129===========================
3130
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3132
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003133Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003134--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003135
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003136- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003137 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003138 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003139 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3140 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003141 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3142 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003143 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3144 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003145
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003146- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3147 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3148
3149- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3150 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3151
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003152Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003153-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003154
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003155- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3156 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3157 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3158 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3159 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3160 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3161 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3162 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3163
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003164- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3165 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3166 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3167 example).
3168
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003169- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003170 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003171 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003172 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003173
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003174- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3175 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3176 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003177 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003178
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003179- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3180 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3181 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3182 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3183 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3184 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3185
3186 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3187
3188 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3189
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003190Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003191-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003192
3193- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3194
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003195- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3196
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003197- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3198 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003199
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003200- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3201 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3202 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3203 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3204 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3205 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003206 attributes.
3207
3208- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3209 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3210 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003211
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003212- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3213 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3214 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003215
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003216- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3217 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3218 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003219 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3220 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3221
3222- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3223 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003224
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003225Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003226-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003227
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003228- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3229 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3230
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003231- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3232 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3233 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3234 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3235
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003236- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3237 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3238 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3239 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3240
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003241 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3242 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3243 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3244 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3245 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3246 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3247 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3248 without losing information).
3249
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003250- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003251 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3252 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3253 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3254 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3255 module).
3256
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003257 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003258 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3259 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3260 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3261 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003262
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003263- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003264 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3265 encoding.
3266
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003267- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3268 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3269
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003270- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003271 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3272
3273- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3274 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3275 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3276 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3277
3278- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3279
3280- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3281 ON, and OFF.
3282
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003283- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3284 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3285
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003286Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003287-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003288
3289- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3290 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3291 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003292
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003293- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3294 been added: -X and -E.
3295
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003296Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003297-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003298
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003299- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3300 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3301
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003302C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003304
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003305- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3306 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3307 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3308 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3309 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3310
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003311- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3312 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3313 as long) arguments.
3314
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003315- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3316 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3317 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3318 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3319 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3320 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3321
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003322- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3323 input.
3324
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003325New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003327
3328Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003329-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003330
3331Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003332-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003333
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003334- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3335 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3336 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3337
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003338- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3339 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3340 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003341 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003342
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3344 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3345 import signal
3346 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003347
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003349 while 1:
3350 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003351 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003352 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3353 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3354 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3355 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003356
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003357
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003358What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3359===========================
3360
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3362
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003363Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003364--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003365
3366- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3367 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3368 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3369
3370- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3371 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3372 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3373 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3374 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3375 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3376 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003377
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003378- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003379 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003380 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3381 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3382 associate a docstring with a property.
3383
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003384- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3385 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3386 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3387 other built-in object types.
3388
3389- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3390 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3391 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3392 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3393 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3394
3395- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3396 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3397
3398- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3399 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003400 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003401 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3402 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3403 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3404 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3405 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3406
3407- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3408 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3409 class.
3410
3411- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3412 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3413 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3414 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3415
3416- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3417 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3418 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3419 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3420
3421- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3422 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3423
3424- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3425 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3426 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3427 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3428 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003429 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003430 with the same value as s.
3431
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003432- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3433
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003434Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003436
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003437- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3438
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003439- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3440 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3441 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3442 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3443 objects.
3444
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003445- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3446 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003447 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3448 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3449
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003450- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3451 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3452 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3453
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003454Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003455-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003456
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003457- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3458 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3459 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3460 by the instances.
3461
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003462- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3463 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3464 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3465
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003466- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3467 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3468 before the entire comparison is complete.
3469
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003470- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3471 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3472 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3473
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003474- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3475 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3476 getwriter().
3477
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003478- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3479 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3480
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003481- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003482 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3483 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3484
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003485- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3486 iterable object.
3487
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003488- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3489 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003490
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003491- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3492 authentication.
3493
3494- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3495 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003496
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003497- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003498 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3499 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3500 a sample driver.)
3501
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003502Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003504
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003505- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3506 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3507 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3508 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3509 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3510 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3511 kernel has large file support.
3512
3513- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3514 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3515 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3516 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3517 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3518
3519- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3520 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3521 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3522
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003523C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003524-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003525
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003526- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3527 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3528
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003529New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003530-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003531
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003532- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3533 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3534
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003535Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003537
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003538- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3539 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3540 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3541 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3542 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3543
3544- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3545 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3546 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3547 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3548
3549- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3550 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3551
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003552Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003553-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003554
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003555- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003556 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3557 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003558
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003559
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003560What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3561===========================
3562
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003563*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3564
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003565Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003566----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003567
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003568- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3569 big to represent as a C double.
3570
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003571- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3572 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3573 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3574 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3575 restriction).
3576
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003577- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3578 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3579 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3580 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3581 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3582
3583 >>> dir([])
3584 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3585 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3586 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3587 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3588 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3589 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3590 'reverse', 'sort']
3591
3592 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3593
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003594- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003595 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3596 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3597 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3598 OverflowError exception.
3599
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003600- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003601 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003602 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3603 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3604 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3605 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3606 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003607 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3609 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3610
3611 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3612 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3613 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3614 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003615
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003616- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003617 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3618 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3619 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3620 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3621 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3622 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3623 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3624 once it is created.
3625
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003626- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3627 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3628 (key, value) pairs.
3629
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003630- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003631 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3632 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3633
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003634- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3635 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3636 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3637 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3638 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003639
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003640- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003641 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3642 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3643
3644 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3645
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003646- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003647 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3648
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003649Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003650-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003651
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003652- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003653 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3654 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003655
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003656- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3657 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3658 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3659 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3660 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3661 in this area anymore).
3662
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003663- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3664 threading.Timer.
3665
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003666- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3667 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3668
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003669- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003670 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3671
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003672- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003673 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3674 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3675 converted to Python longs.
3676
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003677- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003678 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3679
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003680- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3681 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3682 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3683
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003684Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003686
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003687- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3688 division operators as per PEP 238.
3689
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003690Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003692
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003693- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3694 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3695 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3696 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3697
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003698C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003700
3701- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003702
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003703- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3704 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003705 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003706
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3708 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003709 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003711
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003712- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003713 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3714 module:
3715
3716 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003717
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003718 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3719 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003720
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003721 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3722 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003723
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003724 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3725
3726 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3727
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003728- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003729 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3730 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3731 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003732
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003733New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003735
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003736- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3737 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3738 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3739 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3740 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003741
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003742Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003744
3745Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003746-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003747
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003748- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3749 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3750 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3751 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003752 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3753 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3754 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3755 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3756 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003757
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003758- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003759 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3760
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003761
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003762What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3763===========================
3764
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003765*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3766
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003767Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003768-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003769
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003770- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3771 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3772
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003773- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3774 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3775 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003776
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003777- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3778 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3779 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3780 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003781
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003782- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3783
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003784- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003785
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003786Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003787-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003788
3789- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003790 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003791 the module docstring for details.
3792
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003793Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003794-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003795
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003796- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003797 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3798 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3799 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003800
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003801- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3802 Nick Mathewson.
3803
3804Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003806
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003807- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3808 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3809 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3810 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3811 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3812 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3813 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3814 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3815
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003816- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3817 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3818 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3819 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3820
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003821- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3822 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3823 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3824 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3825 come a long way).
3826
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003827- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3828 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3829 write filters for these warnings).
3830
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003831- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3832 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3833 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3834 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3835 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3836
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003837- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3838 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3839 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3840 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3841 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3842 older distribution.
3843
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003844Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003845-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003846
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003847- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3848 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003849 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003850
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003851- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3852 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3853 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3854
3855- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3856
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003857- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3858
3859- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3860
3861- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3862
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003863- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003864
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003865- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3866
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003867New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003868-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003869
3870C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003872
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003873- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3874 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3875 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3876 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3877 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3878 against buffer overruns.
3879
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003880- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003881 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3882 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003883 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3884 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3885 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3886
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003887- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3888 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3889 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3890 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3891 deprecated.
3892
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003893Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003894-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003895
3896- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3897 relevant is found.
3898
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003899
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003900What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003901===========================
3902
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003903*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3904
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003905Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003907
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003908- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3909 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3910 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3911 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3912 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3913 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3914 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3915 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003916 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003917 repaired.
3918
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003919- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003920 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003921 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3922 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3923 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3924 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3925 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3926 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3927 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3928 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3929
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003930- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3931 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3932 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3933 leading BMO character).
3934
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003935- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3936 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3937 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3938
3939 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3940 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3941 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003942
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003943 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3944 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3945 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3946 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3947 for various simple to use conversions.
3948
3949 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3950 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3951
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003952 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3953 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3954 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3955 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3956 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3957 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3958 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3959 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3960 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3961 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3962 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3963 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3964 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3965 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3966 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003967
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003968- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3969 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3970 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003971 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003972 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003973
3974 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003975 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3976 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3977 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3978 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3979 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003980 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3981 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003982
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003983 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3984 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3985 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003986 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003987
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003988- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3989 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3990 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3991 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3992 floating arithmetic,
3993
3994 x = 9007199254740992.0
3995 print long(x)
3996
3997 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3998 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3999 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4000 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4001 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4002 functions are of good quality).
4003
4004 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4005 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4006 algorithms to break.
4007
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004008- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4009 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4010 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4011 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4012 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4013 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4014 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4015 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4016 order.
4017
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004018- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4019 operation along the most common code paths.
4020
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004021- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4022 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4023
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004024- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4025 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4026 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4027 {}.update(UserDict())
4028
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004029- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4030 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4031 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4032 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4033 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4034 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4035 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4036 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4037
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004038- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004039 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004041 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004042 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4043 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004044 join() method of strings
4045 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004046 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4047 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004048 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004049 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004050
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004051- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4052 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4053
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004054- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4055 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4056
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004057- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4058 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4059 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4060 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4061
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004062- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4063 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004064 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004065 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4066 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004067
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004068- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4069
4070
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004071Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004073
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004074- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004075 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004076 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4077 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4078
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004079- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4080 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4081
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004082- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4083 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4084 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4085 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4086
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004087- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4088 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4089 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4090
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004091- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4092
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004093- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4094
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004095- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4096 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4097 that are still imported into string.py).
4098
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004099- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4100
4101- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4102 Now it does.
4103
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004104- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4105
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004106- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4107 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4108 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4109 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4110 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004111 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4112 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004113
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004114- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4115 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4116 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4117 'help(object)'.
4118
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004119Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004121
4122- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004123 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004124 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4125 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4126
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004127- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004128 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4129 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004130
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004131C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004133
4134- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4135 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004136
4137----
4138
4139**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**