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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000015- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
16 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
17 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
18 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
19 This has been repaired.
20
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000021- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
22 over a sequence.
23
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000024- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
25
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000026- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
27 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
28 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
29 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
30 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
31 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
32 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
33 records with equal keys is unchanged).
34
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000035- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
36 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000037
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000038- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
39 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
40 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
41
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000042- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
43 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
44 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
45 freelist.
46
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000047- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
48 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
49
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000050- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
51 number.
52
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000053- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
54 a TypeError exception.
55
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000056- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
57 820195.
58
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +000059- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
60 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
61 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
62
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000063Extension modules
64-----------------
65
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +000066- os.getsid was added.
67
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +000068- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
69 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
70 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
71
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +000072- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
73
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +000074- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
75
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +000076- readline.clear_history was added.
77
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +000078- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
79
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000080- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
81
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000082- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
83
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +000084- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
85
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +000086- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
87
88- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
89
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +000090- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
91
92- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
93
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +000094- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
95 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
96 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
97
98- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
99 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
100 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
101 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
102 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
103 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
104 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
105
106- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
107 iterators from a single iterable.
108
109- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
110 of raising a TypeError exception.
111
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000112Library
113-------
114
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000115- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
116
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000117- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
118
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000119- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
120 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
121
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000122- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
123
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000124- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
125 a string).
126
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000127- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
128
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000129- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
130
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000131- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
132
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000133- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
134
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000135- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
136 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
137 list of fieldnames.
138
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000139- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
140 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
141
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000142- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
143
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000144- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
145 empty lists.
146
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000147- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
148 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
149 and shelves.
150
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000151- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
152 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
153
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000154- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000155 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
156 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000157
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000158- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
159 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
160 allow any iterable. Also the Set.update() has been deprecated because
161 it duplicates Set.union_update().
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000162
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000163- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000164 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
165 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
166
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000167- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
168 and removed in Py2.4.
169
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000170- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
171
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000172Tools/Demos
173-----------
174
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000175- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
176
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000177- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
178 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
179 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
180 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
181
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000182- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
183
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000184- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
185 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
186 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
187 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
188 now.
189
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000190- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
191 in effect
192
193- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
194 C-c C-h
195
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000196- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
197 -d option was given.
198
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000199Build
200-----
201
202C API
203-----
204
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000205- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
206 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
207
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000208- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
209 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
210 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
211 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
212
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000213New platforms
214-------------
215
216Tests
217-----
218
219Windows
220-------
221
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000222- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
223 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
224 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
225
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000226Mac
227----
228
229
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000230What's New in Python 2.3 final?
231===============================
232
233*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
234
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000235IDLE
236----
237
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000238- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
239 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
240 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
241 context-menu actions.
242
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000243- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
244 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
245 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
246 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
247 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
248 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
249 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
250 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
251 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
252
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000253
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000254What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
255=============================================
256
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000257*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000258
259Core and builtins
260-----------------
261
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000262- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000263 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000264 comment at the end are still unsupported.
265
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000266Extension modules
267-----------------
268
269- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
270 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
271 than once. This has been fixed.
272
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000273- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
274 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
275 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
276 call.
277
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000278- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
279
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000280Library
281-------
282
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000283- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
284 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
285
286- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
287 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
288 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
289 restored.
290
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000291IDLE
292----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000293
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000294- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000295
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000296Build
297-----
298
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000299- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
300 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
301
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000302C API
303-----
304
305Windows
306-------
307
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000308- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
309 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
310
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000311- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
312
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000313Mac
314---
315
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000316- Various fixes to pimp.
317
318- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
319
320- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
321 more problems than it solves.
322
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000323
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000324What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
325=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000326
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000327*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
328
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000329Core and builtins
330-----------------
331
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000332- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
333 by sys.setcheckinterval().
334
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000335- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
336 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000337 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000338
339- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
340 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
341 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000342 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000343
344- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
345 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000346
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000347- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
348 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
349 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
350
351- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000352 770247.
353
354- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000355
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000356Extension modules
357-----------------
358
359- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
360 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
361
362- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
363
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000364- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
365
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000366- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
367 contained within the _strptime module.
368
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000369- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
370 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
371
372- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000373 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
374
375- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
376 the find_class attribute, if present.
377
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000378- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000379
380 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
381 (SF bug 763298).
382
383 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000384 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
385 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
386 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000387
388 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
389
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000390Library
391-------
392
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000393- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
394
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000395- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
396 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
397 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
398 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
399 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
400 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
401 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
402 or Tester().
403
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000404- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
405 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
406 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
407 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
408 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
409 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
410 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
411 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
412 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000413
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000414 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000415
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000416- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
417 weren't before was an oversight.
418
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000419- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
420 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
421
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000422- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
423 when there are no lines.
424
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000425- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
426 which could occur with Tk 8.4
427
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000428- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
429 to child processes.
430
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000431- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
432
433- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
434
435- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
436 xmlrpclib.
437
438- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
439 responses.
440
441- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
442 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
443
444- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
445 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
446 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
447
448- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
449 used as patterns.
450
451- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
452 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
453 than Tk 8.3.
454
455- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
456
457- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000458
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000459Tools/Demos
460-----------
461
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000462- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
463
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000464- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
465
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000466- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000467
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000468Build
469-----
470
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000471- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
472
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000473- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
474
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000475- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
476 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000477
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000478- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
479 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
480 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000481
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000482C API
483-----
484
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000485- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
486 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
487
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000488Windows
489-------
490
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000491- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
492 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
493 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
494 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
495 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
496 Python exception ::
497
498 thread.error: can't start new thread
499
500 is raised now.
501
502- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
503 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
504 instead of from DLL teardown.
505
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000506Mac
507---
508
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000509- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000510 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000511 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
512 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
513 the executable in the bundle.
514
515- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000516
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000517- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
518
519- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
520 on Panther.
521
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000522What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
523================================
524
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000525*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000526
527Core and builtins
528-----------------
529
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000530- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
531 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
532 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
533 with the -i option.
534
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000535- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
536 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
537
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000538- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
539 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
540
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000541- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
542 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
543 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
544 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
545 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
546 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
547 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
548 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
549 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
550 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
551 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
552 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
553 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000554
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000555- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
556 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
557 embedded in a lambda expression.
558
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000559- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
560 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
561 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
562 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
563 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
564
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000565- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
566 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
567 matches the restriction on classic classes.
568
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000569- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
570 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
571
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000572- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
573 It's writable again.
574
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000575- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
576 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
577 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000578 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000579
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000580- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
581 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
582 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
583
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000584Extension modules
585-----------------
586
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000587- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
588 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
589
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000590- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
591 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
592 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
593 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
594
595- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
596 collection.
597
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000598- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
599 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
600 unique within a single program run.
601
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000602- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
603 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
604
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000605- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
606 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
607
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000608- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
609 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000610
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000611- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
612
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000613- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
614 Fixes SF bug #730685.
615
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000616- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
617 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
618 for many BSD-derived systems.
619
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000620
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000621Library
622-------
623
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000624- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
625 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
626 primary ones:
627
628 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
629 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
630 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
631
632 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
633 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
634 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
635 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
636 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
637 framework features (which doctest lacks).
638
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000639- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
640 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
641 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
642 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
643 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
644 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
645 argument.
646
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000647- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
648 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
649 in the archive.
650
651- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
652 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
653
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000654- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
655 569574).
656
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000657- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
658 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
659 no more.
660
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000661- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
662 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
663 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
664 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
665 code coverage.
666
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000667- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
668 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
669 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000670 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
671 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000672
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000673- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
674 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
675 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000676 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000677
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000678- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
679
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000680- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
681 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
682 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
683 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
684
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000685- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
686 handling.
687
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000688- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
689 __doc__ of data descriptors.
690
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000691- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
692 in socket.py.
693
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000694- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
695
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000696- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
697 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
698 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
699 opener with proxy support.
700
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000701- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
702
703- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
704
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000705Tools/Demos
706-----------
707
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000708- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
709
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000710- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
711
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000712- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
713 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000714
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000715- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
716 files.
717
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000718Build
719-----
720
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000721- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000722 different root directory.
723
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000724C API
725-----
726
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000727- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
728 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
729 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
730 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
731 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
732 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
733 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
734 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
735 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
736 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
737
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000738- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
739 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
740 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
741 from Python.
742
743
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000744New platforms
745-------------
746
747None this time.
748
749Tests
750-----
751
752- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
753 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
754
755Windows
756-------
757
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000758- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
759
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000760- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
761 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
762 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
763 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
764 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
765 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
766 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
767 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
768 that's what it's for.
769
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000770Mac
771---
772
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000773- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
774 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
775 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
776 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000777- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
778 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
779- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000780
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000781SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
782------------------------------------
783
784430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
785598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
786622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
787661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
788683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
789697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
790713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
791724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
792727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
793729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
794730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
795731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
796732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
797733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
798735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
799740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
800744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
801745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
802747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
803749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
804751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
805753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
806755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
807757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
808760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
809
810
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000811What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
812================================
813
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000814*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000815
816Core and builtins
817-----------------
818
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000819- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
820 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
821
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000822- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
823 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
824 and cannot be strings).
825
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000826- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
827 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
828 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
829 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
830
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000831- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
832 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
833 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
834 Python itself.
835
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000836- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
837 the referenced object, if it has one.
838
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000839- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
840 the thread started at
841 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
842
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000843- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
844 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
845 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
846 placed on a list index.
847
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000848- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
849 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
850 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
851 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
852
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000853- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
854 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
855 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
856 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
857 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
858 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
859 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
860
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000861- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
862 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
863 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
864 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
865 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
866
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000867- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
868 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000869
870- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
871 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
872 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
873 #693195.)
874
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000875- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
876 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000877
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000878- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000879 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000880 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
881 interpreter executions, would fail.
882
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000883- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000884 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000885 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000886
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000887Extension modules
888-----------------
889
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000890- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
891 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
892 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
893 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
894
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000895- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
896 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
897
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000898- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
899 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
900 and Greg Chapman.)
901
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000902- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
903 recursively.
904
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000905- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000906 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
907 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
908 leaks.
909
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000910- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
911
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000912- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
913 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
914 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
915 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
916 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
917 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
918 #705836.
919
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000920- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000921 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
922
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000923- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
924 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
925 See SF bug #692416.
926
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000927- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
928 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
929
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000930- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
931 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
932 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000933
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000934- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000935 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
936 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
937
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000938- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
939 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
940 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
941 timeouts to work properly.
942
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000943Library
944-------
945
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000946- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
947 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
948 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
949 future release.
950
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000951- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
952 for querying platform dependent features.
953
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000954- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000955
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000956- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
957 pickle protocol versions.
958
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000959- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
960 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
961 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
962
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000963- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
964
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000965- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
966 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
967 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
968 modules.
969
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000970- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
971 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
972 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
973
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000974- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
975 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
976
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000977- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
978 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
979 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
980
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000981- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000982 MS Office extensions.
983
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000984- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
985 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
986
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000987- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
988 execution speed of expressions and statements.
989
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000990- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
991 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
992 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
993 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
994 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
995 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
996
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000997- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
998 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
999 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001000
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001001- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1002 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1003 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1004
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001005- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1006
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001007- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1008 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1009 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1010
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001011Tools/Demos
1012-----------
1013
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001014- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1015 See the module docstring for details.
1016
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001017Build
1018-----
1019
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001020- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1021 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001022
1023C API
1024-----
1025
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001026- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1027
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001028- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1029 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1030 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1031
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001032- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1033 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001034
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001035 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1036 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1037 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001038
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001039- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001040 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1041
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001042- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1043 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1044 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001045
1046New platforms
1047-------------
1048
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001049None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001050
1051Tests
1052-----
1053
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001054- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1055 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001056
1057Windows
1058-------
1059
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001060- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1061 function.
1062
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001063- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1064 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001065
1066Mac
1067---
1068
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001069- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1070 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001071
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001072- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1073 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001074
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001075- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1076 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1077 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001078
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001079- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001080 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1081 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001082
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001083- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1084 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001085
1086
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001087What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1088=================================
1089
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001090*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001091
1092Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001093-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001094
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001095- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1096 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1097 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1098
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001099- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1100 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1101 (SF patch #664376.)
1102
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001103- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1104 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1105 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1106 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1107 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1108 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001109 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001110
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001111- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1112 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1113 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1114 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001115 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001116
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001117- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1118 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1119 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1120 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1121 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1122 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1123 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1124 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1125 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1126 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1127 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1128
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001129- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1130 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1131 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1132 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1133 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1134 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1135
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001136- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1137 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1138
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001139- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1140 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1141 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1142 case.)
1143
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001144- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1145 passed as unicode strings.
1146
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001147- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1148 See SF bug #683467.
1149
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001150- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1151 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1152
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001153- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1154
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001155- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1156
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001157- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1158 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1159 arguments.
1160
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001161- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1162 See SF bug #667147.
1163
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001164- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001165 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001166 See SF bug #676155.
1167
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001168- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001169 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001170 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1171 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1172 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1173 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1174 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1175 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001176
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001177Extension modules
1178-----------------
1179
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001180- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1181 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1182 tp_as_number pointer.
1183
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001184- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1185 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1186 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1187 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1188 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1189
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001190- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1191
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001192- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1193
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001194- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001195 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001196 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1197 patch #678531.)
1198
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001199- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1200 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1201
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001202- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1203 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1204
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001205- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1206
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001207- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1208 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1209 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1210
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001211- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1212
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001213- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1214 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1215
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001216- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001217
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001218- datetime changes:
1219
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001220 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1221
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001222 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1223 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1224 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1225 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1226 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1227 now.
1228
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001229 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001230 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1231 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001232
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001233 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001234 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001235 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1236 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1237 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1238 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001239
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001240 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1241 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1242 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001243 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1244
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001245 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1246 by a later example coded by Guido.
1247
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001248 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001249 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1250 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1251 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001252 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1253 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1254
1255 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1256 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1257 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1258 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1259 tzinfo subclass instance.
1260
1261 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1262 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1263 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1264 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1265 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1266 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1267 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1268 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001269
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001270 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1271 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1272 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1273 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1274 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001275 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1276
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001277 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001278
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001279 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1280 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1281 as a naive datetime object.
1282
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001283 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1284 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1285 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1286
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001287 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1288 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1289 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1290 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1291 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1292 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1293 comparison.
1294
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001295 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1296 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1297 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1298 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001299 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001300
1301 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001302
1303 and ::
1304
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001305 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1306
1307 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1308 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1309 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1310 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1311
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001312 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1313 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1314 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1315 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1316 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1317
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001318 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1319 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001320 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1321 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001322
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001323Library
1324-------
1325
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001326- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1327 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1328
1329- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1330 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1331 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1332 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1333 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1334 See PEP 307 for details.
1335
1336- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1337 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1338
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001339- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1340 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001341 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001342 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1343 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001344 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001345
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001346- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1347 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1348
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001349- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1350 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1351 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1352
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001353- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1354
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001355- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1356 exception.
1357
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001358- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1359 class.
1360
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001361- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1362 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1363 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1364
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001365- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1366 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1367
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001368- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001369 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1370 See SF bug #659228.
1371
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001372- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1373 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1374 See SF patch #651082.
1375
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001376- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001377
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001378- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1379 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1380
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001381- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001382 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001383
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001384- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1385 DOS paths from other platforms.
1386
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001387Tools/Demos
1388-----------
1389
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001390- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1391 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1392 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1393 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1394 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1395 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1396 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1397 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1398 example:
1399
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001400 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1401 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001402
1403 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1404
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001405
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001406Build
1407-----
1408
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001409- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1410 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1411 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001412 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1413
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001414 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1415
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001416- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1417 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1418 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1419 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1420 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1421 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1422 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1423 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1424 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1425
1426- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1427 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1428 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1429 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1430
1431- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1432 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1433
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001434C API
1435-----
1436
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001437- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1438 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001439
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001440- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1441 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1442 tp_as_number pointer.
1443
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001444- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1445 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1446 (SF #681367)
1447
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001448- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1449 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1450 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1451 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001452
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001453Tests
1454-----
1455
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001456- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001457 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1458 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1459 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1460 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1461 pydoc.)
1462
1463- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1464
1465- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001466
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001467Windows
1468-------
1469
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001470- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1471 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1472 time).
1473
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001474- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1475 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1476
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001477- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1478 release without strong cryptography.
1479
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001480- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001481 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001482
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001483- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1484 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1485
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001486Mac
1487---
1488
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001489- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1490 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001491
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001492- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1493 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1494 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001495
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001496- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1497 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001498
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001499- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1500 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1501 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1502 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001503
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001504- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001505 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1506 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1507 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001508
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001509
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001510What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001511=================================
1512
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001513*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001514
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001515Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001516--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001517
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001518- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1519
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001520- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1521 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001522 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001523 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001524 a different meaning than before.
1525
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001526- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001527 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001528 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001529
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001530- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001531 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001532 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001533
1534- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1535 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1536 and deallocation.
1537
1538- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1539 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1540
1541- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1542 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1543 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1544 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1545 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1546
1547- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1548 now detected by the garbage collector.
1549
1550- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1551 [SF bug 519621]
1552
1553- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1554 identifier.
1555
1556- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1557 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1558 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1559 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1560 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1561 [SF bug 563060]
1562
1563- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1564 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1565 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1566 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1567 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1568
1569- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1570 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1571 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1572
1573- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1574
1575- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1576 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1577 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1578 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1579 state of the slots would be lost.)
1580
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001581Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001582-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001583
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001584- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001585 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1586 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1587 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1588 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001589 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1590 Jython 2.1.
1591
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001592- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001593 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001594 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1595 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1596 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1597 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1598 these, see PEP 302.
1599
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001600- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1601 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1602 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1603
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001604- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1605 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1606 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1607
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001608- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1609 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1610 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1611
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001612- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1613 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1614 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1615 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1616 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1617 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1618 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1619 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1620 releases or implementations.
1621
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001622- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001623 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1624 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001625
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001626- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1627 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1628
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001629- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1630 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1631 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1632
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001633- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1634 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1635
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001636- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1637 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001638 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1639 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001640
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001641- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1642 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1643 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1644 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1645 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1646
1647 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1648 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1649 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1650 pattern.
1651
1652 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1653 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1654 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1655 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1656
1657 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1658 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1659 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1660 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1661 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1662 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1663
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001664- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1665 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1666 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1667 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1668 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1669 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1670 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1671 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001672
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001673- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1674 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1675 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1676 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1677 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001678 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1679 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1680 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1681 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1682 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1683 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1684 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001685
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001686- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1687 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1688
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001689- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1690 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1691 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1692 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1693 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1694 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1695 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1696 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1697 to Zack Weinberg!
1698
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001699- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1700 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1701 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1702 type. This has been fixed now.
1703
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001704- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1705 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1706 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1707
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001708- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1709 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1710 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1711 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1712 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1713 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1714 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1715 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001716 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001717
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001718- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1719 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1720 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001721
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001722- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1723 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1724 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1725 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1726 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1727 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1728 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1729 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001730 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001731 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1732 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1733
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001734- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1735 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1736 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1737 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1738 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1739 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1740 this.)
1741
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001742- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1743 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001744 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001745 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001746 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1747 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001748 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1749 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001750
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001751- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1752 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1753 currently running.
1754
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001755- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1756 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1757 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1758 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1759
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001760- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1761 as directory names.
1762
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001763- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1764 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1765
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001766- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1767 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1768
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001769- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001770 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1771 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001772
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001773- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1774 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1775 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1776 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1777 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1778
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001779- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1780 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1781 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1782 removed.
1783
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001784- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1785 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1786 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1787
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001788- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1789 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1790 to __debug__.
1791
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001792- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1793 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1794 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1795
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001796- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1797 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1798 deprecated now.
1799
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001800- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1801 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1802 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001803
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001804- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1805 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1806 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1807 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1808 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001809
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001810- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1811 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1812
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001813- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1814 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1815 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001816 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001817 is backward compatible.
1818
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001819- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1820 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1821 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1822 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1823 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1824
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001825- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1826 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1827 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1828 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1829 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1830 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001831
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001832- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1833 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1834
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001835- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1836 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1837
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001838- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1839 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1840 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1841 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1842 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1843
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001844- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1845 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1846 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1847
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001848- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001849 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1850
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001851- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1852 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1853 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001854
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001855- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1856 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1857
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001858- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1859 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1860 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1861
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001862- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1863
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001864Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001865-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001866
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001867- Added three operators to the operator module:
1868 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1869 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1870 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1871
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001872- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1873
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001874- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1875 archives.
1876
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001877- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1878 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1879 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1880
1881 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1882
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001883- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1884 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1885 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001886 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001887
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001888- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1889 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1890 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1891 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001892 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1893 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1894 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1895 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001896
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001897- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1898 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001899
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001900- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1901
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001902- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1903 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1904
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001905- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1906 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1907 supported.
1908
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001909- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1910
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001911- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1912 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001913
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001914- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1915 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1916
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001917- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1918
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001919- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1920 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1921
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001922- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1923 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1924 functions but callable type objects.
1925
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001926- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001927 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001928 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001929
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001930- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1931 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001932
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001933- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1934 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001935
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001936- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1937 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1938 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1939 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1940
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001941- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1942 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001943
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001944- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1945 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1946 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1947 and __imul__.
1948
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001949- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001950 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1951 is called.
1952
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001953- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1954 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1955 interpreter was compiled.
1956
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001957- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1958 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1959 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001960 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001961 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1962 1, not 2.
1963
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001964- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1965 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1966 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1967 limit.
1968
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001969- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1970 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1971 bug #623464.
1972
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001973- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1974 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1975 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1976 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1977
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001978Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001979-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001980
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001981- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1982
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001983- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1984 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1985 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1986 with Python 2.3a2.
1987
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001988- os.path exposes getctime.
1989
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001990- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001991 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001992 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001993 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001994 unit tests of floating point results.
1995
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001996- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1997 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1998 has been increased.
1999
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002000- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2001 executed.
2002
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002003- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2004 postinstallation script.
2005
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002006- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2007 test the current module.
2008
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002009- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002010 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2011 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2012 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2013 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2014
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002015- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002016 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002017 Ward's Optik package.
2018
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002019- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2020 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2021 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2022 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2023
2024- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2025 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002026 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002027
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002028- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2029 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2030 shelf are binary pickles.
2031
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002032- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2033 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2034
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002035- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2036 modules are iterators now.
2037
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002038- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2039 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2040 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2041 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2042 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2043 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002044
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002045- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2046 with their entity value.
2047
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002048- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2049
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002050- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2051 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002052
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002053- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2054 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002055 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002056
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002057- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2058 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2059 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2060 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2061 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2062 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2063 main():
2064
2065 import locale
2066 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2067
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002068- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2069 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2070
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002071- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2072 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2073 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2074 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2075 to the new standard.
2076
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002077- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2078 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2079 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2080 an extension to the database.
2081
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002082- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2083 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2084 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2085 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002086 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002087
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002088- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002089 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002090
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002091- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2092 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2093 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2094 bounded integers.
2095
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002096- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2097 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2098 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2099 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2100 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2101 in existence.
2102
2103 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2104 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2105 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2106 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2107 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2108 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2109
2110 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2111 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2112 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2113 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2114
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002115- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2116 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2117 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2118
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002119- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2120
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002121- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2122 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2123 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2124 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2125
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002126- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2127 argument.
2128
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002129- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2130 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2131 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2132 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2133 [SF patch 560794].
2134
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002135- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2136 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2137 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002138 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2139 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2140 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002141
2142- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2143 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002144
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002145- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2146 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2147 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2148 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002149
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002150- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2151 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2152 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2153 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2154 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2155
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002156- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002157
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002158- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2159
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002160- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2161 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2162 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2163 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2164 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2165 identical to None.
2166
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002167- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2168 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2169 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2170 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2171 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2172 results now.
2173
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002174- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2175 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2176
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002177- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2178 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2179 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2180 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2181 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2182 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2183 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2184 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2185
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002186- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2187
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002188- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2189 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2190
2191- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2192 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2193 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2194 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2195 and other systems.
2196
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002197- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2198 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2199 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2200 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 +00002201 work well with these.
2202
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002203- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2204
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002205- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002206 connections.
2207
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002208- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2209 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2210 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2211
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002212- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2213 sets
2214
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002215- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2216 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2217 name.
2218
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002219- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2220 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2221 passed in.
2222
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002223- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002224 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002225 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2226 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002227
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002228- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2229
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002230- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2231
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002232- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2233 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2234 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2235
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002236- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2237 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2238 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2239 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002240 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002241
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002242- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002243 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002244 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002245
2246- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2247 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2248 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2249
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002250- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002251 the value of its expression argument.
2252
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002253- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2254 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2255 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2256
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002257- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2258 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2259 skipstone browser was included.
2260
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002261- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2262 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2263
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002264Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002265-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002266
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002267- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2268 names in addition to accepting file names.
2269
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002270- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2271 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2272 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2273 still used and useful.)
2274
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002275- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2276 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2277 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2278 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002279
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002280- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2281 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2282 the generated binary.
2283
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002284Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002285-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002286
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002287- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2288
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002289- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2290 except in the hands of experts.
2291
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002292- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002293 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2294 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2295 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002296
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002297- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2298 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2299 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2300 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2301 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2302 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2303 builds.
2304
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002305- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2306 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2307 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2308 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2309 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2310 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2311 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2312 new type.
2313
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002314- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002315
2316 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2317 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2318 positive infinities.
2319
2320 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2321 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2322 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2323 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2324 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2325 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2326 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2327
2328 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2329
2330 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2331
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002332- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2333 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2334 size of the executable.
2335
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002336- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2337 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2338 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2339 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002340
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002341- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2342
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002343- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2344 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2345 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002346
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002347- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2348 well as Unix.
2349
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002350- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2351 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2352 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2353 modules in the README file for details.
2354
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002355C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002356-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002357
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002358- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2359 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002360 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002361 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002362 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002363
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002364- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2365 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2366 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2367 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2368 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2369 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002370 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002371 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2372 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2373 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2374 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2375 aligned.)
2376
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002377- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2378 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2379 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2380
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002381- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2382 level.
2383
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002384- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2385 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2386 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2387 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2388 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2389
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002390- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2391 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2392 code.
2393
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002394- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2395 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2396 adjusting for negative indices.
2397
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002398- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2399 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2400 object.
2401
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002402- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2403 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2404 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2405
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002406- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2407 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002408
2409- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2410
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002411- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2412 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2413 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2414 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2415
2416- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2417
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002418- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002419
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002420- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002421 without going through the buffer API.
2422
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002423- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002424
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002425- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2426 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2427 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2428 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2429
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002430- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2431 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2432
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002433- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002434 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2435
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002436New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002437-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002438
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002439- OpenVMS is now supported.
2440
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002441- AtheOS is now supported.
2442
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002443- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2444
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002445- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2446
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002447Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002448-----
2449
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002450- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2451 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2452 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002453
2454Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002455-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002456
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002457- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2458 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2459 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2460 bugs.
2461 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002462 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002463 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2464 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002465 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002466
2467- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002468 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002469
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002470- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2471 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2472
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002473- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2474 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002475 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002476 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2477
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002478- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2479 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2480 use files" uninstall option).
2481
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002482- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2483
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002484- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2485 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2486
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002487- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2488 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2489 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2490
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002491- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2492 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2493 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2494 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2495 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002496 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2497 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2498 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002499
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002500- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002501 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002502 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2503 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2504 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2505 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2506 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2507 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2508 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2509 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2510 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2511 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2512 work around.
2513
2514- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2515 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2516 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2517 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2518 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2519 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2520 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2521 specified with O_CREAT too).
2522
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002523Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002524----
2525
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002526- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002527
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002528- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2529 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2530 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2531
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002532- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2533 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2534 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2535
2536- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2537 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2538 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2539 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2540 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2541 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2542 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2543 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002544
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002545- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2546 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2547 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002548
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002549- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2550 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2551 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2552 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2553 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002554
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002555- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2556 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2557 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002558
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002559- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2560 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002561
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002562- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2563 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2564 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2565 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2566 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002567
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002568- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2569 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2570 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2571
2572- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2573 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2574 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002575
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002576- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2577 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2578 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2579 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002580 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002581
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002582- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2583 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002584
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002585- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2586 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002587
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002588- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002589 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002590 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2591 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002592
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002593
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002594What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002595===============================
2596
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002597*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2598
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002599Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002600--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002601
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002602- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2603 with a custom metaclass.
2604
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002605Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002606-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002607
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002608- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2609 are proxies.
2610
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002611Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002612-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002613
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002614- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2615 very short strings.
2616
2617- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2618 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2619 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2620 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2621 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2622
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002623Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002624-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002625
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002626- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2627 close or delete time).
2628
2629- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2630 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2631
2632- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2633
2634- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002635 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002636
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002637Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002638-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002639
2640Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002641-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002642
2643C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002644-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002645
2646New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002647-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002648
2649Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002650-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002651
2652Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002653-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002654
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002655- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2656
2657- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2658 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2659
2660- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2661 deleted at process exit time.
2662
2663- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2664 in backslash.
2665
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002666Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002668
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002669- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2670 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2671 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2672
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002673
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002674What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002675===========================
2676
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002677*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2678
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002679Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002680--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002681
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002682- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2683 been extensively updated. See
2684
2685 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2686
2687 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2688
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002689- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2690 deleted!
2691
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002692- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2693 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2694 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2695 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2696 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2697
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002698- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2699
2700 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2701 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2702
2703 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2704 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2705 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2706 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2707 supported anyway.
2708
2709 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2710 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2711
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002712- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2713 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2714 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2715 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2716 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002717
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002718- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2719 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2720 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2721
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002722Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002723-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002724
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002725- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2726 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2727 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2728 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2729 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2730 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002731 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2732 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2733 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2734 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002735
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002736- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2737 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2738 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2739
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002740Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002741-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002742
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002743- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2744
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002745Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002746-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002747
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002748- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2749 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2750 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2751 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2752 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2753 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2754
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002755- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2756
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002757- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2758
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002759- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2760
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002761- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2762 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2763 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2764
2765- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2766
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002767Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002768-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002769
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002770- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2771 off a search on Google.
2772
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002773Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002774-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002775
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002776- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2777 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2778 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2779 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2780 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2781 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2782 other platforms should do likewise.
2783
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002784- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2785 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2786 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2787
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002788C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002790
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002791- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2792 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2793 producing key-value pairs.
2794
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002795- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002796 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002797 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2798 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2799 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2800 previously went unchallenged.
2801
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002802New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002803-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002804
2805Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002806-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002807
2808Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002809-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002810
2811Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002812----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002813
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002814- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2815 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002816
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002817- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2818 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2819 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2820 home.
2821
2822
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002823What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002824===========================
2825
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2827
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002828Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002829--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002830
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002831- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2832 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002833
2834 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002835 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002836
2837 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2838 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002839 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002840 This needs to be documented.
2841
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002842- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2843 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2844
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002845- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2846 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2847 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2848
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002849- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2850 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2851
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002852- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2853 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2854 class forbids it).
2855
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002856- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2857 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2858 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2859
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002860- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2861
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002862Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002863-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002864
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002865- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2866 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002867 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002868
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002869- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2870 (like 1 + '').
2871
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002872Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002873-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002874
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002875- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2876 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2877 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2878 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002879 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002880 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2881
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002882- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2883 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2884 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2885 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2886
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002887- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2888 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002889 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2890 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2891 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002892
2893- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2894 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002895
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002896- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2897 bytes on its input.
2898
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002899Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002900-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002901
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002902- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002903 convenience function.
2904
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002905- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2906 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2907 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002908 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2909 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2910 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2911 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2912 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2913 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002914
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002915- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2916 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2917 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2918 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2919
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002920- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2921 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2922 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2923
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002924- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2925 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2926 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2927 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2928
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002929- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2930 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002931 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002932 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2933 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2934 new -l and -e options.
2935
2936- statcache is now deprecated.
2937
2938- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2939 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002940 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002941 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2942 time properly taken into account.
2943
2944- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2945 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2946 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2947 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2948
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002949Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002950-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002951
2952Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002953-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002954
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002955- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2956 is built with libdb3 if available.
2957
2958- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2959
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002960C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002961-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002962
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002963- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2964 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2965 PySequence_Size().
2966
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002967- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2968
2969- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2970 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2971 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2972
2973- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2974 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2975
2976- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2977 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2978
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002979New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002980-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002981
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002982- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2983 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2984
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002985- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2986 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2987
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002988- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2989
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002990Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002991-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002992
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002993- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2994 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2995
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002996Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002997-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002998
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002999Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003001
3002- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3003 removed completely in the next release.
3004
3005- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3006 OSX.
3007
3008- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3009 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3010
3011- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3012
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003013
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003014What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003015===========================
3016
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3018
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003019Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003021
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003022- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003023 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003024 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003025 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3026 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003027 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3028 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003029 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3030 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003031
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003032- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3033 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3034
3035- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3036 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3037
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003038Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003039-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003040
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003041- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3042 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3043 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3044 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3045 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3046 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3047 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3048 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3049
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003050- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3051 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3052 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3053 example).
3054
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003055- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003056 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003057 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003058 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003059
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003060- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3061 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3062 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003063 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003064
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003065- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3066 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3067 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3068 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3069 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3070 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3071
3072 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3073
3074 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3075
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003076Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003077-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003078
3079- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3080
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003081- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3082
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003083- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3084 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003085
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003086- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3087 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3088 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3089 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3090 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3091 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003092 attributes.
3093
3094- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3095 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3096 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003097
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003098- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3099 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3100 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003101
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003102- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3103 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3104 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003105 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3106 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3107
3108- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3109 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003110
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003111Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003112-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003113
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003114- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3115 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3116
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003117- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3118 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3119 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3120 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3121
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003122- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3123 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3124 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3125 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3126
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003127 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3128 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3129 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3130 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3131 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3132 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3133 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3134 without losing information).
3135
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003136- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003137 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3138 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3139 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3140 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3141 module).
3142
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003143 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003144 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3145 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3146 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3147 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003148
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003149- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003150 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3151 encoding.
3152
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003153- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3154 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3155
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003156- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003157 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3158
3159- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3160 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3161 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3162 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3163
3164- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3165
3166- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3167 ON, and OFF.
3168
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003169- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3170 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3171
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003172Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003173-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003174
3175- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3176 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3177 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003178
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003179- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3180 been added: -X and -E.
3181
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003182Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003183-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003184
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003185- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3186 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3187
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003188C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003189-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003190
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003191- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3192 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3193 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3194 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3195 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3196
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003197- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3198 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3199 as long) arguments.
3200
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003201- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3202 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3203 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3204 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3205 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3206 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3207
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003208- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3209 input.
3210
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003211New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003212-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003213
3214Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003216
3217Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003218-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003219
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003220- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3221 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3222 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3223
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003224- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3225 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3226 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003227 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003228
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3230 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3231 import signal
3232 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003233
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003235 while 1:
3236 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003237 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003238 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3239 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3240 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3241 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003242
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003243
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003244What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3245===========================
3246
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003247*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3248
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003249Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003250--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003251
3252- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3253 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3254 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3255
3256- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3257 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3258 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3259 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3260 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3261 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3262 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003263
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003264- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003265 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003266 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3267 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3268 associate a docstring with a property.
3269
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003270- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3271 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3272 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3273 other built-in object types.
3274
3275- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3276 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3277 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3278 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3279 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3280
3281- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3282 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3283
3284- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3285 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003286 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003287 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3288 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3289 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3290 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3291 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3292
3293- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3294 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3295 class.
3296
3297- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3298 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3299 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3300 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3301
3302- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3303 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3304 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3305 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3306
3307- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3308 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3309
3310- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3311 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3312 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3313 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3314 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003315 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003316 with the same value as s.
3317
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003318- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3319
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003320Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003321----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003322
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003323- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3324
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003325- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3326 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3327 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3328 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3329 objects.
3330
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003331- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3332 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003333 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3334 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3335
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003336- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3337 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3338 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3339
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003340Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003341-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003342
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003343- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3344 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3345 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3346 by the instances.
3347
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003348- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3349 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3350 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3351
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003352- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3353 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3354 before the entire comparison is complete.
3355
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003356- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3357 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3358 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3359
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003360- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3361 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3362 getwriter().
3363
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003364- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3365 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3366
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003367- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003368 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3369 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3370
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003371- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3372 iterable object.
3373
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003374- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3375 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003376
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003377- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3378 authentication.
3379
3380- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3381 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003382
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003383- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003384 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3385 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3386 a sample driver.)
3387
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003388Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003389-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003390
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003391- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3392 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3393 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3394 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3395 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3396 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3397 kernel has large file support.
3398
3399- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3400 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3401 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3402 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3403 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3404
3405- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3406 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3407 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3408
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003409C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003411
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003412- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3413 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3414
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003415New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003417
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003418- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3419 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3420
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003421Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003423
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003424- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3425 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3426 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3427 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3428 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3429
3430- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3431 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3432 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3433 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3434
3435- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3436 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3437
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003438Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003439-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003440
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003441- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003442 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3443 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003444
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003445
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003446What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3447===========================
3448
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3450
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003451Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003452----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003453
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003454- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3455 big to represent as a C double.
3456
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003457- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3458 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3459 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3460 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3461 restriction).
3462
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003463- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3464 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3465 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3466 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3467 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3468
3469 >>> dir([])
3470 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3471 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3472 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3473 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3474 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3475 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3476 'reverse', 'sort']
3477
3478 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3479
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003480- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003481 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3482 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3483 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3484 OverflowError exception.
3485
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003486- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003487 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003488 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3489 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3490 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3491 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3492 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003493 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3495 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3496
3497 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3498 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3499 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3500 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003501
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003502- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003503 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3504 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3505 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3506 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3507 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3508 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3509 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3510 once it is created.
3511
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003512- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3513 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3514 (key, value) pairs.
3515
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003516- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003517 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3518 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3519
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003520- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3521 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3522 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3523 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3524 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003525
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003526- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003527 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3528 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3529
3530 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3531
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003532- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003533 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3534
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003535Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003537
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003538- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003539 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3540 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003541
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003542- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3543 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3544 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3545 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3546 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3547 in this area anymore).
3548
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003549- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3550 threading.Timer.
3551
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003552- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3553 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3554
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003555- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003556 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3557
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003558- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003559 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3560 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3561 converted to Python longs.
3562
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003563- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003564 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3565
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003566- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3567 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3568 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3569
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003570Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003572
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003573- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3574 division operators as per PEP 238.
3575
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003576Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003577-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003578
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003579- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3580 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3581 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3582 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3583
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003584C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003586
3587- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003588
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003589- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3590 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003591 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003592
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003593 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3594 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003595 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003596 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003597
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003598- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003599 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3600 module:
3601
3602 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003603
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003604 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3605 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003606
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003607 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3608 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003609
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003610 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3611
3612 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3613
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003614- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003615 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3616 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3617 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003618
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003619New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003620-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003621
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003622- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3623 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3624 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3625 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3626 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003627
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003628Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003630
3631Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003632-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003633
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003634- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3635 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3636 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3637 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003638 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3639 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3640 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3641 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3642 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003643
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003644- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003645 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3646
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003647
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003648What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3649===========================
3650
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003651*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3652
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003653Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003654-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003655
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003656- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3657 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3658
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003659- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3660 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3661 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003662
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003663- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3664 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3665 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3666 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003667
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003668- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3669
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003670- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003671
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003672Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003674
3675- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003676 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003677 the module docstring for details.
3678
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003679Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003680-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003681
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003682- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003683 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3684 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3685 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003686
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003687- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3688 Nick Mathewson.
3689
3690Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003692
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003693- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3694 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3695 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3696 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3697 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3698 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3699 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3700 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3701
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003702- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3703 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3704 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3705 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3706
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003707- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3708 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3709 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3710 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3711 come a long way).
3712
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003713- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3714 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3715 write filters for these warnings).
3716
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003717- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3718 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3719 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3720 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3721 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3722
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003723- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3724 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3725 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3726 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3727 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3728 older distribution.
3729
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003730Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003731-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003732
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003733- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3734 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003735 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003736
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003737- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3738 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3739 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3740
3741- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3742
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003743- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3744
3745- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3746
3747- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3748
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003749- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003750
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003751- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3752
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003753New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003754-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003755
3756C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003758
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003759- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3760 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3761 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3762 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3763 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3764 against buffer overruns.
3765
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003766- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003767 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3768 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003769 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3770 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3771 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3772
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003773- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3774 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3775 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3776 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3777 deprecated.
3778
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003779Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003781
3782- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3783 relevant is found.
3784
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003785
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003786What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003787===========================
3788
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3790
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003791Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003792----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003793
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003794- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3795 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3796 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3797 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3798 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3799 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3800 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3801 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003802 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003803 repaired.
3804
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003805- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003806 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003807 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3808 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3809 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3810 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3811 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3812 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3813 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3814 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3815
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003816- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3817 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3818 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3819 leading BMO character).
3820
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003821- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3822 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3823 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3824
3825 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3826 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3827 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003828
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003829 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3830 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3831 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3832 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3833 for various simple to use conversions.
3834
3835 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3836 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3837
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3839 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3840 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3841 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3842 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3843 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3844 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3845 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3846 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3847 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3848 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3849 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3850 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3851 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3852 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003853
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003854- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3855 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3856 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003857 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003858 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003859
3860 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003861 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3862 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3863 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3864 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3865 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003866 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3867 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003868
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003869 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3870 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3871 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003872 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003873
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003874- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3875 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3876 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3877 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3878 floating arithmetic,
3879
3880 x = 9007199254740992.0
3881 print long(x)
3882
3883 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3884 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3885 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3886 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3887 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3888 functions are of good quality).
3889
3890 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3891 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3892 algorithms to break.
3893
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003894- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3895 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3896 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3897 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3898 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3899 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3900 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3901 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3902 order.
3903
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003904- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3905 operation along the most common code paths.
3906
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003907- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3908 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3909
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003910- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3911 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3912 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3913 {}.update(UserDict())
3914
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003915- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3916 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3917 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3918 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3919 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3920 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3921 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3922 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3923
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003924- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003925 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003927 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003928 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3929 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003930 join() method of strings
3931 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003932 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3933 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003935 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003936
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003937- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3938 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3939
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003940- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3941 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3942
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003943- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3944 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3945 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3946 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3947
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003948- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3949 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003950 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003951 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3952 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003953
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003954- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3955
3956
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003957Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003959
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003960- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003961 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003962 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3963 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3964
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003965- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3966 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3967
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003968- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3969 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3970 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3971 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3972
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003973- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3974 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3975 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3976
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003977- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3978
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003979- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3980
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003981- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3982 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3983 that are still imported into string.py).
3984
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003985- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3986
3987- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3988 Now it does.
3989
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003990- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3991
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003992- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3993 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3994 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3995 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3996 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003997 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3998 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003999
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004000- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4001 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4002 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4003 'help(object)'.
4004
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004005Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004007
4008- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004009 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004010 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4011 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4012
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004013- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004014 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4015 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004016
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004017C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004019
4020- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4021 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004022
4023----
4024
4025**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**