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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000015- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
16 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
17
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000018- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
19
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000020- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
21
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000022- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
23
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000024- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
25 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
26
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000027- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
28 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
29 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
30
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000031- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
32 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000033 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000034
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000035- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
36 now encodes backslash correctly.
37
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000038- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
39
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000040- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
41 and long longs.
42
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000043- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
44 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
45 message in this case.
46
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000047- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
48 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
49 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
50 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
51 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
52
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000053- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000054
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000055- Speed up some Unicode operations.
56
57- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
58
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000059- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000060 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
61
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000062- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
63
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000064- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
65 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
66
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000067- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
68
69- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
70
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000071- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
72 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
73 was empty.
74
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000075- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
76 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
77
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000078- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000079 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000080
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000081- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
82 codes.
83
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000084- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
85 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
86 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
87
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000088- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
89 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
90
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000091- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000092 (fixes bug #1119418).
93
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000094- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
95
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000096- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
97 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
98
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000099- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
100 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
101 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
102
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000103- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
104
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000105- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
106 reference counts in some error exit cases.
107
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000108- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
109 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
110 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
111 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
112 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
113 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
114 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
115 realloc.
116
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000117- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
118 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
119
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000120- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
121 like their int counterparts.
122
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000123- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
124 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
125 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
126 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
127 for a longer write-up of the problem).
128
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000129- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
130 serializing floats.
131
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000132- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
133 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
134 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
135
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000136- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
137 278.
138
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000139- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
140 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
141 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
142 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000143 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000144 PyNumber_*().
145 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
146
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000147- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
148 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
149 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
150 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
151
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000152- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
153 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
154 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
155 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
156 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
157
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000158- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
159 disabled caused a crash.
160
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000161- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
162 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
163
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000164- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000165 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
166
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000167- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
168
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000169- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000170 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
171 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
172 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000173
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000174- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
175
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000176- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
177 returning None.
178
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000179- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000180 ('\') with a specific error message.
181
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000182- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
183
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000184- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
185 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
186
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000187- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000188 an ferror() call.
189
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000190- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
191 list.sort().
192
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000193- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
194 (2+3) --> (5).
195
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000196- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
197
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000198- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
199 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000200
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000201- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
202 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
203 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
204
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000205- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
206 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
207 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
208
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000209Extension Modules
210-----------------
211
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000212- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
213
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000214- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
215 problem on AIX.
216
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000217- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
218
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000219- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
220
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000221- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
222
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000223- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
224 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
225
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000226- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
227
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000228- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
229 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
230
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000231- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
232
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000233- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
234 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
235
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000236- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
237 returns in cStringIO.c.
238
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000239- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
240 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
241
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000242- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
243
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000244- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
245
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000246- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
247 the file system encoding.
248
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000249- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
250 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000251
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000252- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
253
254- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000255 line without newlines.
256
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000257- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
258 on Windows.
259
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000260- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000261 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
262
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000263- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
264 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
265 for large or negative values.
266
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000267- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000268 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000269
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000270- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
271
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000272- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
273 if available on the platform.
274
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000275- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
276 available on the platform.
277
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000278- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
279 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
280
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000281- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
282
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000283- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
284 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
285 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
286
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000287- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
288
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000289- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
290 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
291
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000292- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000293 file size.
294
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000295- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
296
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000297- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
298 {remove_history,replace_history}
299
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000300- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
301 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000302
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000303- stat_float_times is now True.
304
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000305- array.array objects are now picklable.
306
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000307- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
308 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
309
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000310- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
311 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
312 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
313
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000314- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
315 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000316
317Library
318-------
319
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000320- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
321
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000322- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
323 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
324 LoadError subclasses IOError.
325
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000326- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000327 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
328 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
329 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
330 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
331
332 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
333 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
334 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
335 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
336 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000337
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000338- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
339 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
340 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
341
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000342- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
343
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000344- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
345
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000346- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
347 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
348 illegal argument)
349
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000350- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
351 is an error in the format string.
352
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000353- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
354
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000355- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000356 "parent" argument.
357
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000358- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
359 for padding.
360
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000361- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
362 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
363
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000364- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
365 to get the correct encoding.
366
367- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
368 languages.
369
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000370- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
371
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000372- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
373
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000374- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
375
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000376- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
377 functionality.
378
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000379- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
380
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000381- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
382 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
383
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000384- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
385 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
386 match the Content-Length header.
387
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000388- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
389
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000390- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
391 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000392 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000393
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000394- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
395
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000396- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
397
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000398- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
399 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
400
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000401- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
402 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
403 Tkdnd.
404
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000405- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
406 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
407
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000408- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
409 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
410
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000411- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000412 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
413
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000414- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
415 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
416
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000417- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
418 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
419
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000420- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000421 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000422
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000423- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
424
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000425- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
426 error messages.
427
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000428- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
429
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000430- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
431 Bug #1224621.
432
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000433- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
434 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
435 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
436 terminates by raising StopIteration.
437
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000438- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
439
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000440- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
441 component of the path.
442
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000443- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
444 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
445 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
446 class at all.
447
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000448- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
449 files to PyPI.
450
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000451- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
452 them to PyPI.
453
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000454- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
455 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
456 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
457 work as expected.
458
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000459- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
460 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
461
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000462- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000463 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
464
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000465- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
466
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000467- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
468 to build.
469
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000470- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
471 symbolic links on Windows.
472
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000473- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000474 profile.py if available.
475
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000476- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
477
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000478- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
479 in LWPCookieJar.
480
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000481- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
482
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000483- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
484
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000485- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
486
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000487- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
488
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000489- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
490
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000491- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
492
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000493- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
494
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000495- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
496
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000497- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
498 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
499 be exploited in various ways.
500
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000501- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000502 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
503
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000504- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
505 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
506
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000507- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000508 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
509
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000510- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
511
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000512- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
513
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000514- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
515
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000516- Enhancements to the csv module:
517
518 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000519 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000520 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000521 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
522 reporting.
523 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
524 dictates.
525 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000526 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000527 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000528 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
529 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000530 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
531 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000532 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000533 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
534 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
535 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
536 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
537 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
538 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
539 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
540 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
541 without first creating a dialect class.
542 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
543 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
544 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000545 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000546 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
547 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000548 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
549 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
550 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
551 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000552 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
553 This has been fixed.
554
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000555- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
556 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
557 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
558 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
559
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000560- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
561
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000562- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
563 (Bug #951915).
564
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000565- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
566 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
567 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000568 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000569
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000570- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
571
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000572- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
573 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
574
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000575- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
576
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000577- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
578
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000579- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
580
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000581- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
582
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000583- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
584
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000585- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
586 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
587 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
588
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000589- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000590 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000591
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000592- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
593 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
594 tokenizer with very long source lines.
595
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000596- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
597 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
598
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000599- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
600 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000601
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000602- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
603 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
604
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000605- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
606 correctly.
607
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000608- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
609 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
610 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
611 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
612 between two lines.
613
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000614- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
615 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
616 handlers.
617
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000618- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000619 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
620 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000621
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000622- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
623 considering it exactly like a '*'.
624
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000625- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
626 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000627
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000628- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
629
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000630Build
631-----
632
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000633- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
634 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
635
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000636- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
637 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
638
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000639- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
640 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
641 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000642 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000643
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000644- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
645 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
646 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
647
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000648- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
649
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000650- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
651 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
652
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000653- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
654 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
655 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
656 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
657 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
658 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
659 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
660 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
661
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000662- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
663 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
664 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
665 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
666
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000667
668C API
669-----
670
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000671- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
672
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000673- Removed PyRange_New().
674
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000675- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
676 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
677 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
678 mappings.
679
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000680
681Tests
682-----
683
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000684- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000685
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000686- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
687 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
688
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000689
690Documentation
691-------------
692
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000693- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
694
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000695- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
696
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000697- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
698
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000699- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
700
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000701- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
702
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000703- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
704
705- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
706
707- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
708
709- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
710
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000711- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
712 Closes bug #1166582.
713
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000714- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
715 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
716 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
717
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000718Mac
719---
720
721
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000722New platforms
723-------------
724
725- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
726
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000727
728Tools/Demos
729-----------
730
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000731- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
732 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
733 source files that need an encoding declaration.
734 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
735
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000736- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
737
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000738- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000739
740
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000741What's New in Python 2.4 final?
742===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000743
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000744*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000745
746Core and builtins
747-----------------
748
749- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
750 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
751 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
752
753
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000754What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
755==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000756
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000757*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000758
759Core and builtins
760-----------------
761
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000762- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
763 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
764 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
765
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000766
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000767Library
768-------
769
770- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
771 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
772 raised is re-raised.
773
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000774- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
775 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
776
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000777- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
778 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
779 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
780 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
781 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
782 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
783 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
784 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
785 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
786 by the slice are recomputed now.
787
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000788- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000789
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000790Build
791-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000792
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000793- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
794 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
795 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000796
797C API
798-----
799
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000800- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
801
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000802
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000803What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
804================================
805
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000806*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000807
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000808License
809-------
810
811The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
812is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
813changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
814Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
815intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
816durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
817the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
818License::
819
820 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
821
822says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
823to Python 2.1.1.
824
825The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
826License Version 2.
827
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000828Core and builtins
829-----------------
830
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000831- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
832 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
833 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
834 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
835 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
836 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
837 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000838 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000839 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
840 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
841
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000842- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000843
844Extension Modules
845-----------------
846
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000847- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
848 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
849 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
850 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000851
852Library
853-------
854
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000855- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
856 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
857 returned.
858
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000859- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
860
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000861- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
862 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
863
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000864- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
865
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000866- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
867 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000868
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000869- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
870
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000871- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
872
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000873- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000874 the source code is updated and reloaded.
875
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000876Build
877-----
878
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000879- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000880
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000881What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
882================================
883
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000884*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000885
886Core and builtins
887-----------------
888
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000889- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000890 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
891
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000892- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
893 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
894 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
895 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
896
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000897- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
898 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
899
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000900- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
901 constant.
902
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000903- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
904 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
905 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
906 large), and to anomalies such as
907 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
908 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
909 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
910 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000911
912Extension modules
913-----------------
914
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000915- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
916 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000917 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
918 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
919 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000920
921Library
922-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000923
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000924- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000925 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000926 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
927 --swig-cpp.
928
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000929- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
930 it is set.
931
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000932- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000933
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000934- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
935 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
936 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
937 Closes bug #1039270.
938
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000939- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000940
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000941 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000942 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
943 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
944 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
945 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
946 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
947 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
948 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
949 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
950 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
951 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
952 + Updates to documentation.
953
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000954- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
955 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
956 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
957 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
958
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000959- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000960
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000961- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
962 applications should use the getmember function.
963
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000964- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
965
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000966- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
967 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
968 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
969 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
970 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
971 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
972 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
973 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
974 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
975
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000976- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
977 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000978 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000979
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000980- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
981 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
982 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
983 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
984 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
985 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
986 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
987 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000988
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000989- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
990 the new public features (of which there are many).
991
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000992- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000993 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
994 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
995 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
996 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000997 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000998
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000999- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1000
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001001- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1002 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1003 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1004 options.
1005
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001006- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1007 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1008 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1009 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1010 conditions under which non-string values work.
1011
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001012Build
1013-----
1014
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001015- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1016 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1017 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1018
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001019- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1020 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1021 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1022 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1023 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001024
1025C API
1026-----
1027
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001028- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1029 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1030
1031- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1032
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001033- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1034 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1035 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1036 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1037 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1038 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1039 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1040 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1041 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1042
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001043- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1044
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001045- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1046 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1047 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001048
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001049Tests
1050-----
1051
1052- test__locale ported to unittest
1053
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001054Mac
1055---
1056
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001057- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1058 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1059 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001060
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001061Tools/Demos
1062-----------
1063
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001064- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1065 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1066 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1067 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1068 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001069
1070
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001071What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1072=================================
1073
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001074*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001075
1076Core and builtins
1077-----------------
1078
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001079- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001080 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1081
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001082- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1083 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1084 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1085 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1086 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1087 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1088 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1089 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001090 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1091 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1092 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1093 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1094 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001095
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001096- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1097 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1098 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1099 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1100 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1101
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001102- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1103
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001104- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1105 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1106
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001107- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1108 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1109 modified the list.
1110
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001111- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1112 functions is now writable.
1113
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001114- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1115 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1116 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1117 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1118
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001119- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1120 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1121 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1122 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1123 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001124
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001125- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1126 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1127
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001128Extension modules
1129-----------------
1130
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001131- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1132
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001133- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1134 data.
1135
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001136- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1137 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1138 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1139 supposed to have been truncated away.
1140
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001141- Added socket.socketpair().
1142
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001143- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1144 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1145
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001146- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001147 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1148
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001149Library
1150-------
1151
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001152- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001153 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001154
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001155- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1156 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1157
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001158- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1159 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1160
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001161- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1162
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001163- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1164 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001165
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001166- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1167 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1168
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001169- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1170
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001171- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1172
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001173- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1174
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001175- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1176 Percivall.
1177
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001178- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1179 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1180
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001181- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1182 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1183 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001184 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001185
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001186- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1187 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1188 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1189 and exponent.
1190
1191- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1192
1193- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001194 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001195 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1196
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001197- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1198 to the readline module.
1199
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001200- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001201 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1202 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001203
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001204- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1205 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1206 contains symlinks.
1207
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001208- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1209 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1210
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001211- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1212 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1213 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1214
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001215- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1216 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1217 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1218 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1219 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1220 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1221 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1222 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1223 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1224 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1225 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1226 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1227 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1228
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001229- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1230
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001231Tools/Demos
1232-----------
1233
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001234- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1235 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1236
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001237- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1238
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001239Build
1240-----
1241
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001242- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1243 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1244 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1245 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1246 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1247 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1248 plans to do so.
1249
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001250- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1251 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1252
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001253- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1254 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1255
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001256- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1257 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1258
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001259- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1260 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1261
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001262- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1263 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1264
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001265C API
1266-----
1267
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001268..
1269
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001270Documentation
1271-------------
1272
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001273- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1274 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1275
1276- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1277 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1278 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001279
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001280New platforms
1281-------------
1282
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001283- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1284
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001285Tests
1286-----
1287
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001288..
1289
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001290Windows
1291-------
1292
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001293- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1294 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1295 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1296 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1297 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1298 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1299 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1300 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1301 the problem.
1302
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001303Mac
1304---
1305
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001306..
1307
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001308
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001309What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1310=================================
1311
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001312*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001313
1314Core and builtins
1315-----------------
1316
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001317- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1318 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1319 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1320 sensitive code.
1321
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001322- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001323 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001324
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001325 @staticmethod
1326 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001327
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001328 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001329
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001330- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1331 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1332 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1333 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1334 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1335 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1336 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1337 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1338 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1339 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1340 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1341
1342 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1343 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1344 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1345 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1346 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1347 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1348 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1349
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001350- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1351 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1352
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001353- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001354 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001355
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001356- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001357 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001358 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1359
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001360- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001361 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1362 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1363
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001364- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1365 types that support garbage collection.
1366
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001367- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1368
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001369- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1370 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1371 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1372 Jython.
1373
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001374- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1375
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001376- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1377 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1378
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001379- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1380 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1381 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001382
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001383- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1384 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1385 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1386
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001387Extension modules
1388-----------------
1389
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001390- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1391
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001392Library
1393-------
1394
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001395- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1396 TIS-620
1397
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001398- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1399 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1400 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1401 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1402 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1403 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1404 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1405 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1406 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1407 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1408
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001409- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1410
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001411- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1412 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1413 same as when the argument is omitted).
1414 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1415
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001416- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1417
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001418- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1419 schemes are offered.
1420
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001421- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1422
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001423- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1424 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1425 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1426
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001427- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1428
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001429- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1430 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1431
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001432- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1433 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1434 when dummy_threading is being used.
1435
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001436- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1437 from a tarfile.
1438
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001439- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001440 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001441
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001442- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1443 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1444 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1445 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1446
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001447- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1448 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1449
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001450- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1451 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1452 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1453 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1454 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1455 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1456 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1457 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1458 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1459 by some other method in progress).
1460
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001461- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1462 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1463 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001464
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001465- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1466
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001467- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1468 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1469 AM Kuchling.
1470
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001471- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1472 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1473 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1474
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001475- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1476 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1477 instead of unsigned.
1478
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001479- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001480 no longer part of the public API.
1481
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001482- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1483 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1484 string methods of the same name).
1485
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001486- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001487 SF patch 945642.
1488
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001489- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1490
1491 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1492
1493 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1494 DocTestSuites.
1495
1496- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1497 that provide thread-local data.
1498
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001499- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1500 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1501
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001502- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1503
1504- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1505 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1506 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1507
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001508- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1509
1510 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1511 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1512 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001513
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001514 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1515 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1516 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1517 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1518
1519 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1520 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1521
1522 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1523 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1524 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1525 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1526
1527 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1528 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1529 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1530 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1531 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1532
1533 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1534 wrapping help output.
1535
1536 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1537 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1538 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001539
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001540C API
1541-----
1542
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001543- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1544 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1545 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1546 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1547 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1548 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1549 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1550 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1551 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1552 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1553 its visible semantics have not changed.
1554
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001555- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1556 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1557
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001558Documentation
1559-------------
1560
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001561- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001562
1563 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001564 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001565
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001566 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001567
1568 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1569
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001570- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001571
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001572Tests
1573-----
1574
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001575- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001576 platforms that use the Makefile.
1577
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001578- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1579 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1580 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1581
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001582
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001583What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1584=================================
1585
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001586*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001587
1588Core and builtins
1589-----------------
1590
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001591- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1592 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1593 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1594 objects now (one object instead of three).
1595
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001596- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1597 Windows DLLs.
1598
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001599- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1600 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001601
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001602- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1603 a new .pyc magic.
1604
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001605- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1606 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1607 be there.
1608
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001609- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1610 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1611 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1612
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001613- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1614 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1615 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1616
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001617- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1618
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001619- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1620 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1621 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001622
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001623- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1624 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1625
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001626- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1627
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001628- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001629 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001630
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001631- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1632
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001633- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1634
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001635- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1636 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1637
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001638- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1639 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1640 Fixes bug #858016 .
1641
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001642- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1643 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1644 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1645
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001646- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1647 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1648 improves their performance (about 35%).
1649
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001650- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1651 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1652 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1653
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001654- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1655 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1656 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1657 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1658
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001659- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1660 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001661 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001662 length is not known).
1663
1664- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1665 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001666 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1667 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001668 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1669
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001670- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1671 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1672
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001673- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1674 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1675 keyword arguments.
1676
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001677- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1678 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1679 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1680
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001681- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1682 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1683 cases.
1684
1685- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1686 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1687 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1688 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1689 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1690 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1691 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1692 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1693 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1694 a release build.
1695
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001696- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1697 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1698
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001699- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001700 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001701
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001702- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1703 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1704 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1705 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1706 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1707 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1708 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1709 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1710 destroyed.
1711
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001712- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1713 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1714 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1715 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1716 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1717 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1718 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1719 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1720
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001721- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1722 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1723 character other than a space.
1724
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001725- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1726 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1727 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1728 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1729 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1730 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1731 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1732 attributes with the same name.
1733
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001734- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1735 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1736 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1737 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1738 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1739 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1740 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1741 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1742 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1743 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1744 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1745 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1746 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1747 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001748
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001749- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1750 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1751 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1752 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1753 This has been repaired.
1754
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001755- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1756
1757- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1758
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001759- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1760 over a sequence.
1761
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001762- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001763 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001764
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001765- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1766
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001767- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1768 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1769 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1770 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1771 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1772 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1773 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1774 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1775
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001776- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1777 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1778 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1779
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001780- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1781 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1782 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1783 freelist.
1784
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001785- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1786 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1787
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001788- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1789 number.
1790
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001791- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1792 a TypeError exception.
1793
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001794- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1795 820195.
1796
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001797- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1798 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1799 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1800
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001801- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001802 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1803 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001804
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001805- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1806 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1807 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1808
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001809- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1810 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001811 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001812
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001813- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001814 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1815 the first call.
1816
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001817
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001818Extension modules
1819-----------------
1820
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001821- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1822 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1823
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001824- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1825 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1826 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1827 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1828 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1829 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1830 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001831
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001832- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1833
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001834- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1835
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001836- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1837 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1838
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001839- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1840 fewer false positives.
1841
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001842- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1843 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1844
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001845- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001846 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1847
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001848- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001849 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001850 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001851 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1852 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001853
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001854- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1855 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1856 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1857 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1858
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001859- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1860 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1861 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1862 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1863 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1864 #897625.
1865
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001866- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1867 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1868
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001869- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1870 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1871 and pops on either side of the deque.
1872
1873- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1874 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1875
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001876- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1877 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1878 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1879 other functions that expect a function argument.
1880
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001881- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1882
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001883- os.getsid was added.
1884
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001885- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1886 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1887 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1888
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001889- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1890
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001891- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1892
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001893- readline.clear_history was added.
1894
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001895- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1896
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001897- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1898
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001899- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1900
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001901- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1902
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001903- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1904
1905- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1906
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001907- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1908
1909- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1910
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001911- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1912 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1913 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1914
1915- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1916 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1917 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1918 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1919 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1920 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1921 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1922
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001923- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1924 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1925 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1926 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001927
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001928- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001929 iterators from a single iterable.
1930
1931- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1932 of raising a TypeError exception.
1933
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001934- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1935 as parameter.
1936
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001937Library
1938-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001939
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001940- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1941
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001942- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1943 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1944 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001945
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001946- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1947 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1948 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001949
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001950- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001951
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001952- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1953 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001954
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001955- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1956 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1957
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001958- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1959
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001960- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001961 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001962
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001963- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001964 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001965
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001966- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1967
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001968- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1969 on cygwin and mingw32.
1970
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001971- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1972
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001973- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1974 module.
1975
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001976- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1977 installation scheme for all platforms.
1978
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001979- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001980 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001981
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001982- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1983 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1984 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1985
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001986- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1987 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1988 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1989
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001990- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1991
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001992- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1993
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001994- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1995 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1996
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001997- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1998 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1999 type pattern with the same value exists.
2000
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002001- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2002 when run from the command prompt).
2003
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002004- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2005 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2006
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002007- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2008 default sort).
2009
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002010- Added global runctx function to profile module
2011
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002012- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2013
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002014- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2015
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002016- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2017
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002018- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002019 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2020 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2021 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2022 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2023 accordingly.
2024
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002025- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2026 decoding standards.
2027
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002028- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2029 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2030 called for all requests.
2031
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002032- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2033 they are passed to the compiler.
2034
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002035- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2036 indent, width and depth.
2037
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002038- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2039 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2040
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002041- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2042 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2043
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002044- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2045
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002046- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2047
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002048- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2049
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002050- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2051 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2052
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002053- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002054 for better performance.
2055
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002056- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002057
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002058- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2059 a string).
2060
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002061- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2062
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002063- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2064
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002065- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2066
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002067- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2068
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002069- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2070 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2071 list of fieldnames.
2072
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002073- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2074 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2075
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002076- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2077
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002078- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2079 empty lists.
2080
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002081- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2082 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2083 and shelves.
2084
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002085- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2086 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2087
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002088- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002089 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2090 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002091
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002092- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2093 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002094 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002095
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002096- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002097 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2098 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2099
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002100- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2101 and removed in Py2.4.
2102
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002103- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2104
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002105- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2106
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002107Tools/Demos
2108-----------
2109
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002110- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2111 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2112
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002113- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2114
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002115- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2116 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2117 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2118 destination in situations where both files are given.
2119
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002120- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2121 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2122 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2123 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2124
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002125- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2126
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002127- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2128 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2129 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2130 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2131 now.
2132
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002133- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2134 in effect
2135
2136- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2137 C-c C-h
2138
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002139- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2140 -d option was given.
2141
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002142Build
2143-----
2144
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002145- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2146 build under OS X.
2147
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002148- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2149 --enable-profiling.
2150
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002151- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2152 is configured --with-tsc.
2153
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002154- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2155 on AMD64.
2156
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002157- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2158 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2159
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002160- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2161 removed.
2162
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002163- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2164 supported (see PEP 11).
2165
2166- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2167
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002168- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2169
2170- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2171 (see PEP 11).
2172
2173- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2174 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2175
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002176C API
2177-----
2178
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002179- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2180 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2181 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2182
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002183- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2184 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2185 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2186 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2187
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002188- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2189 generator objects.
2190
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002191- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2192 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002193 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2194 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002195
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002196- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2197 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2198
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002199- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2200 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2201 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2202 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2203 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2204
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002205- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2206 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2207 about 10% faster.
2208
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002209- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2210 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2211
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002212- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2213 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2214 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2215 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2216
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002217Windows
2218-------
2219
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002220- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2221 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2222 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2223 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2224
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002225- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2226 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2227 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2228
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002229
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002230What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2231===============================
2232
2233*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2234
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002235IDLE
2236----
2237
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002238- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2239 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2240 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2241 context-menu actions.
2242
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002243- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2244 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2245 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2246 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2247 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2248 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2249 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2250 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2251 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2252
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002253
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002254What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2255=============================================
2256
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002257*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002258
2259Core and builtins
2260-----------------
2261
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002262- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002263 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002264 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2265
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002266Extension modules
2267-----------------
2268
2269- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2270 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2271 than once. This has been fixed.
2272
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002273- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2274 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2275 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2276 call.
2277
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002278- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2279
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002280Library
2281-------
2282
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002283- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2284 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2285
2286- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2287 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2288 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2289 restored.
2290
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002291IDLE
2292----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002293
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002294- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002295
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002296Build
2297-----
2298
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002299- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2300 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2301
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002302C API
2303-----
2304
2305Windows
2306-------
2307
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002308- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2309 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2310
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002311- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2312
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002313Mac
2314---
2315
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002316- Various fixes to pimp.
2317
2318- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2319
2320- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2321 more problems than it solves.
2322
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002323
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002324What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2325=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002326
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002327*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2328
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002329Core and builtins
2330-----------------
2331
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002332- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2333 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2334
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002335- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2336 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002337 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002338
2339- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2340 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2341 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002342 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002343
2344- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2345 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002346
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002347- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2348 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2349 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2350
2351- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002352 770247.
2353
2354- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002355
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002356Extension modules
2357-----------------
2358
2359- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2360 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2361
2362- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2363
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002364- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2365
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002366- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2367 contained within the _strptime module.
2368
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002369- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2370 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2371
2372- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002373 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2374
2375- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2376 the find_class attribute, if present.
2377
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002378- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002379
2380 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2381 (SF bug 763298).
2382
2383 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002384 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2385 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2386 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002387
2388 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2389
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002390Library
2391-------
2392
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002393- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2394
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002395- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2396 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2397 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2398 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2399 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2400 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2401 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2402 or Tester().
2403
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002404- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2405 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2406 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2407 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2408 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2409 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2410 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2411 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2412 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002413
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002414 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002415
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002416- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2417 weren't before was an oversight.
2418
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002419- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2420 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2421
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002422- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2423 when there are no lines.
2424
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002425- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2426 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2427
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002428- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2429 to child processes.
2430
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002431- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2432
2433- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2434
2435- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2436 xmlrpclib.
2437
2438- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2439 responses.
2440
2441- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2442 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2443
2444- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2445 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2446 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2447
2448- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2449 used as patterns.
2450
2451- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2452 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2453 than Tk 8.3.
2454
2455- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2456
2457- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002458
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002459Tools/Demos
2460-----------
2461
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002462- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2463
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002464- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2465
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002466- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002467
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002468Build
2469-----
2470
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002471- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2472
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002473- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2474
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002475- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2476 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002477
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002478- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2479 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2480 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002481
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002482C API
2483-----
2484
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002485- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2486 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2487
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002488Windows
2489-------
2490
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002491- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2492 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2493 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2494 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2495 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2496 Python exception ::
2497
2498 thread.error: can't start new thread
2499
2500 is raised now.
2501
2502- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2503 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2504 instead of from DLL teardown.
2505
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002506Mac
2507---
2508
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002509- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002510 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002511 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2512 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2513 the executable in the bundle.
2514
2515- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002516
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002517- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2518
2519- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2520 on Panther.
2521
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002522What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2523================================
2524
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002525*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002526
2527Core and builtins
2528-----------------
2529
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002530- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2531 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2532 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2533 with the -i option.
2534
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002535- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2536 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2537
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002538- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2539 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2540
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002541- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2542 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2543 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2544 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2545 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2546 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2547 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2548 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2549 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2550 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2551 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2552 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2553 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002554
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002555- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2556 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2557 embedded in a lambda expression.
2558
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002559- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2560 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2561 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2562 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2563 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2564
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002565- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2566 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2567 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2568
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002569- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2570 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2571
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002572- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2573 It's writable again.
2574
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002575- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2576 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2577 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002578 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002579
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002580- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2581 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2582 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2583
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002584Extension modules
2585-----------------
2586
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002587- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2588 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2589
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002590- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2591 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2592 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2593 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2594
2595- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2596 collection.
2597
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002598- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2599 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2600 unique within a single program run.
2601
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002602- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2603 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2604
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002605- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2606 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2607
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002608- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2609 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002610
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002611- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2612
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002613- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2614 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2615
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002616- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2617 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2618 for many BSD-derived systems.
2619
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002620
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002621Library
2622-------
2623
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002624- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2625 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2626 primary ones:
2627
2628 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2629 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2630 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2631
2632 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2633 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2634 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2635 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2636 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2637 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2638
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002639- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2640 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2641 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2642 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2643 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2644 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2645 argument.
2646
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002647- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2648 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2649 in the archive.
2650
2651- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2652 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2653
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002654- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2655 569574).
2656
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002657- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2658 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2659 no more.
2660
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002661- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2662 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2663 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2664 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2665 code coverage.
2666
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002667- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2668 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2669 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002670 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2671 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002672
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002673- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2674 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2675 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002676 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002677
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002678- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2679
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002680- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2681 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2682 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2683 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2684
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002685- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2686 handling.
2687
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002688- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2689 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2690
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002691- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2692 in socket.py.
2693
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002694- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2695
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002696- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2697 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2698 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2699 opener with proxy support.
2700
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002701- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2702
2703- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2704
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002705Tools/Demos
2706-----------
2707
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002708- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2709
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002710- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2711
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002712- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2713 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002714
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002715- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2716 files.
2717
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002718Build
2719-----
2720
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002721- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002722 different root directory.
2723
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002724C API
2725-----
2726
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002727- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2728 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2729 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2730 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2731 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2732 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2733 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2734 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2735 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2736 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2737
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002738- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2739 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2740 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2741 from Python.
2742
2743
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002744New platforms
2745-------------
2746
2747None this time.
2748
2749Tests
2750-----
2751
2752- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2753 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2754
2755Windows
2756-------
2757
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002758- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2759
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002760- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2761 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2762 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2763 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2764 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2765 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2766 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2767 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2768 that's what it's for.
2769
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002770Mac
2771---
2772
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002773- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2774 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2775 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2776 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002777- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2778 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2779- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002780
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002781SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2782------------------------------------
2783
2784430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2785598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2786622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2787661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2788683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2789697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2790713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2791724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2792727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2793729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2794730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2795731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2796732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2797733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2798735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2799740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2800744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2801745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2802747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2803749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2804751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2805753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2806755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2807757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2808760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2809
2810
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002811What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2812================================
2813
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002814*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002815
2816Core and builtins
2817-----------------
2818
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002819- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2820 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2821
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002822- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2823 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2824 and cannot be strings).
2825
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002826- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2827 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2828 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2829 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2830
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002831- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2832 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2833 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2834 Python itself.
2835
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002836- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2837 the referenced object, if it has one.
2838
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002839- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2840 the thread started at
2841 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2842
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002843- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2844 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2845 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2846 placed on a list index.
2847
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002848- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2849 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2850 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2851 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2852
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002853- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2854 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2855 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2856 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2857 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2858 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2859 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2860
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002861- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2862 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2863 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2864 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2865 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2866
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002867- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2868 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002869
2870- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2871 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2872 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2873 #693195.)
2874
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002875- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2876 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002877
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002878- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002879 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002880 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2881 interpreter executions, would fail.
2882
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002883- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002884 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002885 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002886
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002887Extension modules
2888-----------------
2889
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002890- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2891 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2892 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2893 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2894
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002895- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2896 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2897
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002898- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2899 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2900 and Greg Chapman.)
2901
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002902- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2903 recursively.
2904
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002905- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002906 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2907 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2908 leaks.
2909
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002910- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2911
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002912- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2913 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2914 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2915 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2916 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2917 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2918 #705836.
2919
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002920- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002921 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2922
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002923- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2924 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2925 See SF bug #692416.
2926
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002927- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2928 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2929
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002930- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2931 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2932 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002933
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002934- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002935 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2936 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2937
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002938- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2939 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2940 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2941 timeouts to work properly.
2942
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002943Library
2944-------
2945
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002946- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2947 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2948 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2949 future release.
2950
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002951- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2952 for querying platform dependent features.
2953
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002954- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002955
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002956- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2957 pickle protocol versions.
2958
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002959- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2960 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2961 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2962
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002963- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2964
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002965- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2966 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2967 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2968 modules.
2969
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002970- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2971 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2972 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2973
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002974- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2975 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2976
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002977- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2978 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2979 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2980
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002981- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002982 MS Office extensions.
2983
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002984- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2985 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2986
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002987- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2988 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2989
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002990- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2991 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2992 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2993 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2994 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2995 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2996
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002997- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2998 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2999 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003000
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003001- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3002 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3003 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3004
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003005- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3006
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003007- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3008 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3009 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3010
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003011Tools/Demos
3012-----------
3013
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003014- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3015 See the module docstring for details.
3016
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003017Build
3018-----
3019
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003020- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3021 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003022
3023C API
3024-----
3025
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003026- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3027
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003028- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3029 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3030 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3031
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003032- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3033 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003034
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003035 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3036 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3037 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003038
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003039- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003040 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3041
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003042- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3043 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3044 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003045
3046New platforms
3047-------------
3048
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003049None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003050
3051Tests
3052-----
3053
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003054- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3055 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003056
3057Windows
3058-------
3059
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003060- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3061 function.
3062
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003063- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3064 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003065
3066Mac
3067---
3068
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003069- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3070 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003071
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003072- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3073 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003074
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003075- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3076 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3077 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003078
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003079- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003080 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3081 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003082
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003083- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3084 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003085
3086
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003087What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3088=================================
3089
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003090*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003091
3092Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003093-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003094
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003095- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3096 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3097 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3098
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003099- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3100 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3101 (SF patch #664376.)
3102
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003103- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3104 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3105 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3106 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3107 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3108 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003109 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003110
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003111- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3112 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3113 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3114 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003115 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003116
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003117- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3118 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3119 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3120 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3121 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3122 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3123 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3124 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3125 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3126 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3127 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3128
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003129- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3130 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3131 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3132 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3133 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3134 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3135
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003136- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3137 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3138
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003139- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3140 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3141 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3142 case.)
3143
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003144- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3145 passed as unicode strings.
3146
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003147- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3148 See SF bug #683467.
3149
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003150- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3151 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3152
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003153- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3154
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003155- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3156
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003157- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3158 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3159 arguments.
3160
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003161- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3162 See SF bug #667147.
3163
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003164- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003165 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003166 See SF bug #676155.
3167
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003168- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003169 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003170 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3171 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3172 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3173 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3174 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3175 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003176
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003177Extension modules
3178-----------------
3179
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003180- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3181 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3182 tp_as_number pointer.
3183
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003184- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3185 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3186 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3187 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3188 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3189
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003190- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3191
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003192- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3193
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003194- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003195 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003196 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3197 patch #678531.)
3198
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003199- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3200 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3201
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003202- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3203 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3204
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003205- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3206
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003207- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3208 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3209 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3210
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003211- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3212
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003213- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3214 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3215
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003216- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003217
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003218- datetime changes:
3219
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003220 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3221
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003222 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3223 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3224 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3225 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3226 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3227 now.
3228
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003229 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003230 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3231 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003232
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003233 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003234 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003235 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3236 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3237 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3238 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003239
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003240 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3241 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3242 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003243 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3244
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003245 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3246 by a later example coded by Guido.
3247
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003248 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003249 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3250 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3251 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003252 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3253 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3254
3255 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3256 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3257 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3258 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3259 tzinfo subclass instance.
3260
3261 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3262 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3263 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3264 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3265 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3266 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3267 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3268 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003269
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003270 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3271 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3272 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3273 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3274 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003275 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3276
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003277 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003278
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003279 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3280 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3281 as a naive datetime object.
3282
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003283 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3284 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3285 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3286
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003287 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3288 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3289 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3290 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3291 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3292 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3293 comparison.
3294
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003295 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3296 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3297 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3298 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003299 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003300
3301 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003302
3303 and ::
3304
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003305 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3306
3307 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3308 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3309 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3310 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3311
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003312 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3313 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3314 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3315 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3316 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3317
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003318 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3319 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003320 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3321 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003322
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003323Library
3324-------
3325
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003326- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3327 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3328
3329- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3330 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3331 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3332 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3333 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3334 See PEP 307 for details.
3335
3336- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3337 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3338
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003339- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3340 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003341 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003342 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3343 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003344 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003345
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003346- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3347 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3348
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003349- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3350 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3351 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3352
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003353- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3354
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003355- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3356 exception.
3357
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003358- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3359 class.
3360
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003361- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3362 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3363 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3364
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003365- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3366 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3367
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003368- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003369 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3370 See SF bug #659228.
3371
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003372- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3373 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3374 See SF patch #651082.
3375
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003376- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003377
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003378- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3379 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3380
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003381- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003382 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003383
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003384- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3385 DOS paths from other platforms.
3386
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003387Tools/Demos
3388-----------
3389
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003390- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3391 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3392 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3393 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3394 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3395 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3396 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3397 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3398 example:
3399
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003400 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3401 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003402
3403 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3404
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003405
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003406Build
3407-----
3408
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003409- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3410 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3411 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003412 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3413
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003414 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3415
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003416- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3417 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3418 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3419 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3420 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3421 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3422 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3423 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3424 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3425
3426- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3427 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3428 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3429 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3430
3431- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3432 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3433
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003434C API
3435-----
3436
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003437- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3438 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003439
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003440- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3441 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3442 tp_as_number pointer.
3443
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003444- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3445 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3446 (SF #681367)
3447
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003448- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3449 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3450 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3451 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003452
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003453Tests
3454-----
3455
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003456- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003457 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3458 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3459 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3460 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3461 pydoc.)
3462
3463- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3464
3465- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003466
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003467Windows
3468-------
3469
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003470- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3471 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3472 time).
3473
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003474- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3475 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3476
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003477- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3478 release without strong cryptography.
3479
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003480- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003481 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003482
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003483- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3484 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3485
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003486Mac
3487---
3488
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003489- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3490 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003491
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003492- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3493 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3494 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003495
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003496- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3497 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003498
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003499- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3500 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3501 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3502 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003503
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003504- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003505 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3506 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3507 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003508
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003509
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003510What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003511=================================
3512
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003513*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003515Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003516--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003517
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003518- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3519
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003520- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3521 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003522 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003523 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003524 a different meaning than before.
3525
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003526- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003527 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003528 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003529
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003530- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003531 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003532 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003533
3534- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3535 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3536 and deallocation.
3537
3538- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3539 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3540
3541- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3542 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3543 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3544 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3545 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3546
3547- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3548 now detected by the garbage collector.
3549
3550- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3551 [SF bug 519621]
3552
3553- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3554 identifier.
3555
3556- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3557 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3558 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3559 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3560 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3561 [SF bug 563060]
3562
3563- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3564 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3565 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3566 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3567 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3568
3569- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3570 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3571 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3572
3573- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3574
3575- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3576 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3577 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3578 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3579 state of the slots would be lost.)
3580
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003581Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003583
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003584- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003585 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3586 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3587 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3588 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003589 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3590 Jython 2.1.
3591
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003592- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003593 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003594 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3595 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3596 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3597 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3598 these, see PEP 302.
3599
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003600- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3601 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3602 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3603
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003604- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3605 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3606 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3607
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003608- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3609 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3610 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3611
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003612- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3613 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3614 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3615 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3616 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3617 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3618 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3619 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3620 releases or implementations.
3621
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003622- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003623 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3624 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003625
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003626- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3627 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3628
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003629- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3630 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3631 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3632
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003633- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3634 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3635
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003636- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3637 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003638 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3639 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003640
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003641- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3642 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3643 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3644 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3645 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3646
3647 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3648 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3649 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3650 pattern.
3651
3652 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3653 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3654 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3655 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3656
3657 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3658 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3659 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3660 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3661 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3662 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3663
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003664- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3665 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3666 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3667 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3668 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3669 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3670 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3671 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003672
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003673- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3674 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3675 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3676 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3677 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003678 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3679 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3680 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3681 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3682 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3683 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3684 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003685
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003686- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3687 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3688
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003689- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3690 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3691 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3692 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3693 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3694 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3695 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3696 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3697 to Zack Weinberg!
3698
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003699- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3700 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3701 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3702 type. This has been fixed now.
3703
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003704- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3705 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3706 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3707
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003708- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3709 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3710 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3711 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3712 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3713 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3714 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3715 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003716 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003717
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003718- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3719 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3720 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003721
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003722- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3723 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3724 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3725 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3726 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3727 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3728 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3729 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003730 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003731 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3732 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3733
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003734- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3735 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3736 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3737 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3738 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3739 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3740 this.)
3741
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003742- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3743 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003744 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003745 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003746 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3747 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003748 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3749 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003750
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003751- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3752 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3753 currently running.
3754
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003755- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3756 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3757 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3758 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3759
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003760- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3761 as directory names.
3762
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003763- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3764 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3765
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003766- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3767 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3768
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003769- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003770 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3771 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003772
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003773- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3774 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3775 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3776 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3777 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3778
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003779- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3780 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3781 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3782 removed.
3783
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003784- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3785 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3786 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3787
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003788- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3789 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3790 to __debug__.
3791
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003792- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3793 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3794 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3795
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003796- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3797 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3798 deprecated now.
3799
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003800- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3801 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3802 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003803
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003804- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3805 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3806 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3807 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3808 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003809
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003810- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3811 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3812
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003813- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3814 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3815 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003816 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003817 is backward compatible.
3818
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003819- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3820 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3821 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3822 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3823 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3824
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003825- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3826 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3827 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3828 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3829 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3830 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003831
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003832- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3833 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3834
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003835- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3836 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3837
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003838- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3839 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3840 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3841 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3842 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3843
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003844- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3845 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3846 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3847
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003848- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003849 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3850
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003851- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3852 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3853 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003854
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003855- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3856 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3857
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003858- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3859 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3860 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3861
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003862- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3863
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003864Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003865-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003866
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003867- Added three operators to the operator module:
3868 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3869 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3870 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3871
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003872- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3873
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003874- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3875 archives.
3876
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003877- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3878 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3879 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3880
3881 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3882
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003883- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3884 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3885 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003886 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003887
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003888- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3889 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3890 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3891 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003892 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3893 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3894 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3895 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003896
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003897- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3898 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003899
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003900- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3901
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003902- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3903 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3904
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003905- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3906 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3907 supported.
3908
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003909- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3910
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003911- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3912 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003913
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003914- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3915 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3916
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003917- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3918
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003919- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3920 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3921
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003922- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3923 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3924 functions but callable type objects.
3925
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003926- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003927 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003928 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003929
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003930- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3931 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003932
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003933- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3934 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003935
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003936- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3937 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3938 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3939 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3940
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003941- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3942 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003943
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003944- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3945 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3946 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3947 and __imul__.
3948
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003949- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003950 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3951 is called.
3952
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003953- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3954 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3955 interpreter was compiled.
3956
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003957- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3958 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3959 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003960 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003961 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3962 1, not 2.
3963
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003964- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3965 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3966 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3967 limit.
3968
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003969- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3970 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3971 bug #623464.
3972
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003973- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3974 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3975 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3976 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3977
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003978Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003979-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003980
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003981- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3982
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003983- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3984 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3985 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3986 with Python 2.3a2.
3987
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003988- os.path exposes getctime.
3989
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003990- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003991 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003992 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003993 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003994 unit tests of floating point results.
3995
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003996- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3997 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3998 has been increased.
3999
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004000- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4001 executed.
4002
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004003- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4004 postinstallation script.
4005
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004006- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4007 test the current module.
4008
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004009- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004010 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4011 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4012 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4013 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4014
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004015- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004016 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004017 Ward's Optik package.
4018
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004019- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4020 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4021 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4022 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4023
4024- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4025 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004026 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004027
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004028- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4029 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4030 shelf are binary pickles.
4031
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004032- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4033 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4034
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004035- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4036 modules are iterators now.
4037
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004038- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4039 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4040 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4041 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4042 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4043 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004044
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004045- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4046 with their entity value.
4047
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004048- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4049
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004050- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4051 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004052
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004053- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4054 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004055 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004056
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004057- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4058 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4059 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4060 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4061 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4062 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4063 main():
4064
4065 import locale
4066 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4067
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004068- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4069 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4070
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004071- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4072 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4073 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4074 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4075 to the new standard.
4076
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004077- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4078 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4079 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4080 an extension to the database.
4081
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004082- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4083 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4084 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4085 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004086 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004087
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004088- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004089 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004090
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004091- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4092 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4093 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4094 bounded integers.
4095
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004096- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4097 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4098 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4099 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4100 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4101 in existence.
4102
4103 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4104 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4105 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4106 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4107 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4108 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4109
4110 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4111 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4112 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4113 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4114
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004115- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4116 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4117 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4118
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004119- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4120
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004121- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4122 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4123 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4124 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4125
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004126- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4127 argument.
4128
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004129- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4130 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4131 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4132 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4133 [SF patch 560794].
4134
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004135- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4136 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4137 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004138 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4139 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4140 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004141
4142- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4143 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004144
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004145- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4146 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4147 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4148 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004149
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004150- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4151 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4152 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4153 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4154 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4155
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004156- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004157
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004158- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4159
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004160- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4161 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4162 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4163 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4164 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4165 identical to None.
4166
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004167- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4168 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4169 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4170 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4171 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4172 results now.
4173
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004174- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4175 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4176
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004177- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4178 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4179 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4180 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4181 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4182 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4183 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4184 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4185
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004186- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4187
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004188- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4189 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4190
4191- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4192 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4193 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4194 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4195 and other systems.
4196
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004197- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4198 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4199 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4200 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 +00004201 work well with these.
4202
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004203- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4204
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004205- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004206 connections.
4207
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004208- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4209 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4210 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4211
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004212- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4213 sets
4214
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004215- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4216 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4217 name.
4218
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004219- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4220 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4221 passed in.
4222
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004223- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004224 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004225 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4226 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004227
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004228- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4229
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004230- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4231
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004232- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4233 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4234 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4235
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004236- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4237 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4238 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4239 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004240 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004241
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004242- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004243 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004244 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004245
4246- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4247 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4248 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4249
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004250- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004251 the value of its expression argument.
4252
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004253- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4254 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4255 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4256
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004257- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4258 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4259 skipstone browser was included.
4260
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004261- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4262 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4263
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004264Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004266
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004267- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4268 names in addition to accepting file names.
4269
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004270- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4271 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4272 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4273 still used and useful.)
4274
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004275- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4276 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4277 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4278 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004279
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004280- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4281 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4282 the generated binary.
4283
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004284Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004285-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004286
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004287- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4288
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004289- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4290 except in the hands of experts.
4291
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004292- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004293 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4294 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4295 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004296
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004297- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4298 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4299 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4300 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4301 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4302 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4303 builds.
4304
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004305- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4306 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4307 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4308 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4309 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4310 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4311 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4312 new type.
4313
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004314- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004315
4316 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4317 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4318 positive infinities.
4319
4320 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4321 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4322 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4323 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4324 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4325 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4326 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4327
4328 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4329
4330 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4331
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004332- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4333 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4334 size of the executable.
4335
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004336- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4337 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4338 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4339 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004340
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004341- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4342
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004343- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4344 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4345 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004346
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004347- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4348 well as Unix.
4349
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004350- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4351 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4352 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4353 modules in the README file for details.
4354
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004355C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004357
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004358- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4359 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004360 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004361 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004362 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004363
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004364- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4365 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4366 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4367 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4368 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4369 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004370 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004371 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4372 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4373 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4374 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4375 aligned.)
4376
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004377- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4378 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4379 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4380
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004381- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4382 level.
4383
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004384- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4385 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4386 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4387 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4388 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4389
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004390- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4391 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4392 code.
4393
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004394- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4395 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4396 adjusting for negative indices.
4397
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004398- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4399 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4400 object.
4401
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004402- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4403 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4404 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4405
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004406- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4407 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004408
4409- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4410
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004411- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4412 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4413 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4414 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4415
4416- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4417
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004418- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004419
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004420- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004421 without going through the buffer API.
4422
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004424
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004425- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4426 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4427 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4428 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4429
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004430- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4431 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4432
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004433- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004434 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4435
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004436New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004438
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004439- OpenVMS is now supported.
4440
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004441- AtheOS is now supported.
4442
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004443- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4444
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004445- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4446
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004447Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448-----
4449
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004450- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4451 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4452 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004453
4454Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004456
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004457- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4458 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4459 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4460 bugs.
4461 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004462 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004463 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4464 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004465 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004466
4467- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004468 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004469
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004470- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4471 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4472
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004473- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4474 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004475 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004476 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4477
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004478- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4479 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4480 use files" uninstall option).
4481
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004482- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4483
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004484- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4485 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4486
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004487- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4488 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4489 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4490
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004491- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4492 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4493 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4494 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4495 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004496 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4497 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4498 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004499
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004500- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004501 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004502 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4503 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4504 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4505 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4506 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4507 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4508 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4509 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4510 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4511 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4512 work around.
4513
4514- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4515 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4516 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4517 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4518 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4519 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4520 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4521 specified with O_CREAT too).
4522
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004523Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004524----
4525
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004526- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004527
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004528- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4529 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4530 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4531
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004532- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4533 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4534 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4535
4536- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4537 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4538 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4539 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4540 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4541 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4542 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4543 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004544
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004545- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4546 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4547 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004548
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004549- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4550 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4551 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4552 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4553 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004554
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004555- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4556 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4557 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004558
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004559- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4560 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004561
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004562- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4563 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4564 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4565 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4566 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004567
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004568- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4569 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4570 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4571
4572- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4573 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4574 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004575
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004576- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4577 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4578 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4579 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004580 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004581
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004582- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4583 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004584
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004585- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4586 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004587
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004588- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004589 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004590 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4591 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004592
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004593
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004594What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004595===============================
4596
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4598
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004599Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004601
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004602- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4603 with a custom metaclass.
4604
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004605Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004607
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004608- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4609 are proxies.
4610
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004611Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004612-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004613
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004614- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4615 very short strings.
4616
4617- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4618 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4619 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4620 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4621 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4622
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004623Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004625
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004626- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4627 close or delete time).
4628
4629- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4630 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4631
4632- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4633
4634- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004635 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004636
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004637Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004639
4640Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004642
4643C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004645
4646New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004647-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004648
4649Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004650-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004651
4652Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004654
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004655- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4656
4657- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4658 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4659
4660- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4661 deleted at process exit time.
4662
4663- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4664 in backslash.
4665
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004666Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004668
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004669- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4670 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4671 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4672
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004673
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004674What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004675===========================
4676
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4678
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004679Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004680--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004681
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004682- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4683 been extensively updated. See
4684
4685 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4686
4687 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4688
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004689- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4690 deleted!
4691
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004692- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4693 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4694 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4695 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4696 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4697
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004698- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4699
4700 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4701 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4702
4703 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4704 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4705 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4706 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4707 supported anyway.
4708
4709 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4710 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4711
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004712- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4713 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4714 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4715 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4716 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004717
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004718- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4719 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4720 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4721
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004722Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004724
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004725- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4726 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4727 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4728 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4729 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4730 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004731 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4732 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4733 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4734 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004735
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004736- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4737 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4738 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4739
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004740Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004742
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004743- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4744
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004745Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004746-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004747
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004748- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4749 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4750 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4751 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4752 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4753 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4754
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004755- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4756
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004757- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4758
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004759- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4760
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004761- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4762 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4763 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4764
4765- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4766
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004767Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004768-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004769
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004770- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4771 off a search on Google.
4772
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004773Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004775
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004776- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4777 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4778 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4779 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4780 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4781 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4782 other platforms should do likewise.
4783
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004784- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4785 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4786 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4787
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004788C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004789-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004790
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004791- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4792 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4793 producing key-value pairs.
4794
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004795- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004796 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004797 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4798 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4799 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4800 previously went unchallenged.
4801
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004802New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004804
4805Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004806-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004807
4808Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004810
4811Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004812----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004813
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004814- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4815 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004816
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004817- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4818 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4819 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4820 home.
4821
4822
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004823What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004824===========================
4825
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4827
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004828Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004830
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004831- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4832 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004833
4834 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004835 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004836
4837 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4838 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004839 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004840 This needs to be documented.
4841
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004842- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4843 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4844
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004845- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4846 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4847 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4848
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004849- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4850 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4851
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004852- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4853 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4854 class forbids it).
4855
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004856- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4857 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4858 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4859
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004860- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4861
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004862Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004864
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004865- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4866 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004867 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004868
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004869- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4870 (like 1 + '').
4871
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004872Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004873-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004874
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004875- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4876 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4877 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4878 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004879 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004880 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4881
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004882- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4883 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4884 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4885 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4886
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004887- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4888 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004889 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4890 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4891 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004892
4893- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4894 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004895
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004896- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4897 bytes on its input.
4898
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004899Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004901
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004902- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004903 convenience function.
4904
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004905- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4906 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4907 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004908 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4909 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4910 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4911 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4912 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4913 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004914
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004915- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4916 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4917 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4918 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4919
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004920- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4921 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4922 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4923
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004924- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4925 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4926 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4927 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4928
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004929- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4930 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004931 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004932 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4933 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4934 new -l and -e options.
4935
4936- statcache is now deprecated.
4937
4938- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4939 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004940 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004941 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4942 time properly taken into account.
4943
4944- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4945 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4946 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4947 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4948
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004949Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004951
4952Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004953-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004954
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004955- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4956 is built with libdb3 if available.
4957
4958- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4959
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004960C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004961-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004962
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004963- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4964 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4965 PySequence_Size().
4966
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004967- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4968
4969- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4970 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4971 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4972
4973- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4974 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4975
4976- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4977 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4978
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004979New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004981
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004982- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4983 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4984
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004985- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4986 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4987
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004988- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4989
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004990Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004992
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004993- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4994 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4995
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004996Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004997-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004998
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004999Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005000----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005001
5002- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5003 removed completely in the next release.
5004
5005- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5006 OSX.
5007
5008- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5009 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5010
5011- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5012
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005013
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005014What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005015===========================
5016
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005017*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5018
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005019Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005020--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005021
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005022- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005023 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005024 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005025 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5026 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005027 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5028 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005029 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5030 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005031
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005032- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5033 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5034
5035- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5036 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5037
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005038Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005039-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005040
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005041- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5042 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5043 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5044 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5045 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5046 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5047 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5048 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5049
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005050- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5051 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5052 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5053 example).
5054
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005055- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005056 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005057 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005058 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005059
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005060- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5061 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5062 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005063 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005064
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005065- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5066 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5067 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5068 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5069 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5070 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5071
5072 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5073
5074 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5075
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005076Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005078
5079- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5080
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005081- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5082
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005083- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5084 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005085
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005086- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5087 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5088 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5089 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5090 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5091 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005092 attributes.
5093
5094- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5095 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5096 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005097
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005098- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5099 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5100 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005101
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005102- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5103 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5104 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005105 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5106 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5107
5108- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5109 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005110
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005111Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005112-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005113
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005114- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5115 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5116
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005117- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5118 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5119 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5120 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5121
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005122- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5123 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5124 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5125 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5126
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005127 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5128 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5129 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5130 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5131 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5132 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5133 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5134 without losing information).
5135
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005136- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005137 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5138 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5139 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5140 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5141 module).
5142
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005143 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005144 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5145 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5146 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5147 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005148
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005149- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005150 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5151 encoding.
5152
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005153- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5154 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5155
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005156- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005157 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5158
5159- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5160 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5161 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5162 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5163
5164- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5165
5166- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5167 ON, and OFF.
5168
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005169- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5170 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5171
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005172Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005173-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005174
5175- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5176 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5177 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005178
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005179- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5180 been added: -X and -E.
5181
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005182Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005183-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005184
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005185- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5186 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5187
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005188C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005189-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005190
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005191- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5192 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5193 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5194 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5195 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5196
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005197- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5198 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5199 as long) arguments.
5200
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005201- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5202 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5203 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5204 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5205 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5206 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5207
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005208- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5209 input.
5210
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005211New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005212-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005213
5214Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005215-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005216
5217Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005218-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005219
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005220- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5221 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5222 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5223
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005224- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5225 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5226 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005227 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005228
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005229 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5230 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5231 import signal
5232 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005233
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005234 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005235 while 1:
5236 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005237 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005238 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5239 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5240 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5241 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005242
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005243
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005244What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5245===========================
5246
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005247*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5248
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005249Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005250--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005251
5252- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5253 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5254 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5255
5256- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5257 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5258 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5259 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5260 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5261 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5262 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005263
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005264- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005265 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005266 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5267 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5268 associate a docstring with a property.
5269
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005270- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5271 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5272 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5273 other built-in object types.
5274
5275- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5276 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5277 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5278 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5279 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5280
5281- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5282 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5283
5284- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5285 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005286 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005287 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5288 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5289 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5290 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5291 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5292
5293- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5294 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5295 class.
5296
5297- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5298 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5299 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5300 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5301
5302- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5303 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5304 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5305 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5306
5307- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5308 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5309
5310- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5311 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5312 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5313 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5314 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005315 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005316 with the same value as s.
5317
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005318- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5319
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005320Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005322
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005323- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5324
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005325- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5326 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5327 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5328 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5329 objects.
5330
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005331- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5332 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005333 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5334 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5335
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005336- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5337 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5338 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5339
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005340Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005341-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005342
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005343- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5344 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5345 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5346 by the instances.
5347
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005348- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5349 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5350 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5351
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005352- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5353 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5354 before the entire comparison is complete.
5355
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005356- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5357 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5358 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5359
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005360- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5361 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5362 getwriter().
5363
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005364- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5365 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5366
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005367- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005368 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5369 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5370
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005371- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5372 iterable object.
5373
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005374- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5375 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005376
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005377- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5378 authentication.
5379
5380- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5381 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005382
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005383- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005384 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5385 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5386 a sample driver.)
5387
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005388Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005389-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005390
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005391- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5392 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5393 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5394 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5395 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5396 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5397 kernel has large file support.
5398
5399- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5400 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5401 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5402 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5403 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5404
5405- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5406 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5407 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5408
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005409C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005410-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005411
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005412- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5413 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5414
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005415New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005416-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005417
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005418- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5419 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5420
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005421Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005422-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005423
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005424- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5425 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5426 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5427 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5428 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5429
5430- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5431 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5432 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5433 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5434
5435- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5436 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5437
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005438Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005439-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005440
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005441- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005442 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5443 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005444
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005445
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005446What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5447===========================
5448
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005449*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5450
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005451Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005452----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005453
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005454- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5455 big to represent as a C double.
5456
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005457- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5458 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5459 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5460 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5461 restriction).
5462
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005463- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5464 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5465 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5466 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5467 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5468
5469 >>> dir([])
5470 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5471 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5472 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5473 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5474 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5475 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5476 'reverse', 'sort']
5477
5478 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5479
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005480- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005481 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5482 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5483 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5484 OverflowError exception.
5485
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005486- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005487 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005488 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5489 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5490 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5491 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5492 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005493 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005494 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5495 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5496
5497 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5498 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5499 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5500 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005501
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005502- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005503 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5504 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5505 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5506 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5507 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5508 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5509 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5510 once it is created.
5511
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005512- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5513 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5514 (key, value) pairs.
5515
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005516- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005517 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5518 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5519
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005520- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5521 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5522 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5523 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5524 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005525
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005526- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005527 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5528 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5529
5530 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5531
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005532- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005533 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5534
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005535Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005536-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005537
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005538- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005539 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5540 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005541
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005542- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5543 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5544 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5545 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5546 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5547 in this area anymore).
5548
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005549- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5550 threading.Timer.
5551
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005552- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5553 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5554
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005555- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005556 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5557
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005558- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005559 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5560 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5561 converted to Python longs.
5562
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005563- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005564 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5565
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005566- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5567 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5568 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5569
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005570Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005571-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005572
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005573- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5574 division operators as per PEP 238.
5575
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005576Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005577-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005578
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005579- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5580 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5581 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5582 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5583
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005584C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005585-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005586
5587- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005588
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005589- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5590 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005591 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005592
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005593 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5594 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005595 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005596 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005597
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005598- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005599 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5600 module:
5601
5602 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005603
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005604 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5605 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005606
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005607 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5608 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005609
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005610 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5611
5612 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5613
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005614- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005615 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5616 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5617 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005618
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005619New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005620-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005621
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005622- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5623 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5624 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5625 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5626 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005627
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005628Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005629-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005630
5631Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005632-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005633
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005634- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5635 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5636 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5637 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005638 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5639 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5640 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5641 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5642 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005643
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005644- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005645 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5646
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005647
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005648What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5649===========================
5650
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005651*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5652
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005653Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005654-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005655
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005656- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5657 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5658
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005659- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5660 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5661 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005662
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005663- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5664 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5665 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5666 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005667
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005668- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5669
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005670- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005671
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005672Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005673-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005674
5675- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005676 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005677 the module docstring for details.
5678
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005679Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005680-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005681
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005682- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005683 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5684 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5685 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005686
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005687- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5688 Nick Mathewson.
5689
5690Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005691----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005692
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005693- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5694 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5695 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5696 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5697 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5698 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5699 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5700 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5701
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005702- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5703 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5704 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5705 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5706
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005707- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5708 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5709 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5710 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5711 come a long way).
5712
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005713- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5714 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5715 write filters for these warnings).
5716
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005717- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5718 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5719 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5720 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5721 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5722
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005723- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5724 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5725 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5726 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5727 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5728 older distribution.
5729
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005730Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005731-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005732
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005733- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5734 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005735 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005736
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005737- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5738 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5739 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5740
5741- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5742
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005743- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5744
5745- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5746
5747- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5748
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005749- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005750
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005751- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5752
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005753New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005754-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005755
5756C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005757-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005758
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005759- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5760 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5761 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5762 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5763 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5764 against buffer overruns.
5765
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005766- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005767 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5768 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005769 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5770 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5771 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5772
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005773- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5774 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5775 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5776 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5777 deprecated.
5778
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005779Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005780-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005781
5782- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5783 relevant is found.
5784
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005785
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005786What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005787===========================
5788
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005789*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5790
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005791Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005792----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005793
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005794- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5795 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5796 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5797 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5798 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5799 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5800 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5801 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005802 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005803 repaired.
5804
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005805- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005806 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005807 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5808 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5809 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5810 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5811 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5812 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5813 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5814 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5815
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005816- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5817 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5818 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5819 leading BMO character).
5820
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005821- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5822 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5823 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5824
5825 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5826 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5827 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005828
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005829 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5830 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5831 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5832 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5833 for various simple to use conversions.
5834
5835 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5836 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5837
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005838 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5839 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5840 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5841 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5842 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5843 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5844 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5845 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5846 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5847 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5848 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5849 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5850 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5851 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5852 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005853
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005854- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5855 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5856 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005857 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005858 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005859
5860 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005861 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5862 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5863 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5864 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5865 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005866 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5867 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005868
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005869 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5870 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5871 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005872 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005873
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005874- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5875 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5876 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5877 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5878 floating arithmetic,
5879
5880 x = 9007199254740992.0
5881 print long(x)
5882
5883 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5884 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5885 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5886 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5887 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5888 functions are of good quality).
5889
5890 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5891 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5892 algorithms to break.
5893
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005894- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5895 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5896 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5897 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5898 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5899 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5900 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5901 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5902 order.
5903
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005904- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5905 operation along the most common code paths.
5906
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005907- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5908 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5909
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005910- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5911 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5912 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5913 {}.update(UserDict())
5914
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005915- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5916 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5917 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5918 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5919 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5920 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5921 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5922 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5923
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005924- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005925 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005926
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005927 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005928 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5929 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005930 join() method of strings
5931 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005932 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5933 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005934 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005935 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005936
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005937- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5938 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5939
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005940- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5941 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5942
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005943- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5944 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5945 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5946 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5947
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005948- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5949 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005950 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005951 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5952 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005953
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005954- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5955
5956
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005957Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005958-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005959
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005960- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005961 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005962 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5963 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5964
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005965- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5966 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5967
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005968- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5969 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5970 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5971 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5972
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005973- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5974 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5975 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5976
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005977- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5978
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005979- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5980
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005981- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5982 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5983 that are still imported into string.py).
5984
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005985- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5986
5987- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5988 Now it does.
5989
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005990- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5991
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005992- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5993 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5994 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5995 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5996 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005997 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5998 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005999
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006000- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6001 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6002 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6003 'help(object)'.
6004
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006005Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006006-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006007
6008- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006009 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006010 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6011 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6012
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006013- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006014 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6015 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006016
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006017C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006018-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006019
6020- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6021 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006022
6023----
6024
6025**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**