blob: 0c96ac9cc6e36571c3efd14be5b2a9f48311ab98 [file] [log] [blame]
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
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +000015- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
16 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
17 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
18 Python itself.
19
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +000020- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
21 the referenced object, if it has one.
22
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +000023- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
24 the thread started at
25 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
26
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +000027- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
28 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
29 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
30 placed on a list index.
31
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +000032- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
33 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
34 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
35 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
36
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000037- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
38 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
39 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
40 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
41 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
42 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
43 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
44
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000045- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
46 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
47 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
48 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
49 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
50
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000051- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
52 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000053
54- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
55 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
56 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
57 #693195.)
58
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000059- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
60 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000061
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000062- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000063 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000064 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
65 interpreter executions, would fail.
66
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000067- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +000068 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +000069 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000070
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000071Extension modules
72-----------------
73
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +000074- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
75 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
76
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +000077- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
78 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
79 and Greg Chapman.)
80
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000081- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
82 recursively.
83
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +000084- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +000085 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
86 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
87 leaks.
88
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +000089- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
90
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +000091- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
92 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
93 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
94 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
95 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
96 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
97 #705836.
98
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +000099- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
100 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
101
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000102- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
103 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
104 See SF bug #692416.
105
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000106- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
107 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
108
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000109- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
110 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
111 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000112
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000113- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
114 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
115 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
116 timeouts to work properly.
117
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000118Library
119-------
120
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000121- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
122 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
123 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
124
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000125- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
126 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
127
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000128- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
129 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
130 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
131
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000132- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000133 MS Office extensions.
134
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000135- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
136 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
137
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000138- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
139 execution speed of expressions and statements.
140
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000141- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
142 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
143 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
144 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
145 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
146 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
147
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000148- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
149 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
150 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000151
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000152- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
153 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
154 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
155
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000156- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
157
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000158Tools/Demos
159-----------
160
161TBD
162
163Build
164-----
165
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000166- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
167 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000168
169C API
170-----
171
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000172- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
173 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
174 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
175
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000176- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG.
177
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000178- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000179 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
180
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000181- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
182 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
183 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000184
185New platforms
186-------------
187
188TBD
189
190Tests
191-----
192
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000193- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
194 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000195
196Windows
197-------
198
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000199- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
200 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000201
202Mac
203---
204
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000205- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
206 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000207
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000208- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
209 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000210
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000211- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
212 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
213 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000214
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000215- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000216 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
217 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000218
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000219- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
220 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000221
222
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000223What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
224=================================
225
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000226*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000227
228Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000229-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000230
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000231- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
232 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
233 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
234
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000235- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
236 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
237 (SF patch #664376.)
238
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000239- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
240 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
241 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
242 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
243 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
244 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000245 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000246
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000247- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
248 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
249 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
250 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000251 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000252
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000253- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
254 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
255 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
256 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
257 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
258 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
259 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
260 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
261 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
262 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
263 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
264
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000265- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
266 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
267 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
268 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
269 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
270 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
271
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000272- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
273 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
274
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000275- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
276 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
277 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
278 case.)
279
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000280- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
281 passed as unicode strings.
282
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000283- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
284 See SF bug #683467.
285
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000286- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
287 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
288
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000289- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
290
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000291- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
292
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000293- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
294 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
295 arguments.
296
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000297- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
298 See SF bug #667147.
299
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000300- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000301 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000302 See SF bug #676155.
303
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000304- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000305 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000306 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
307 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
308 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
309 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
310 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
311 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000312
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000313Extension modules
314-----------------
315
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000316- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
317 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
318 tp_as_number pointer.
319
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000320- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
321 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
322 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
323 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
324 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
325
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000326- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
327
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000328- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
329
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000330- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000331 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000332 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
333 patch #678531.)
334
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000335- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
336 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
337
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000338- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
339 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
340
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000341- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
342
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000343- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
344 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
345 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
346
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000347- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
348
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000349- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
350 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
351
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000352- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000353
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000354- datetime changes:
355
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000356 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
357
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000358 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
359 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
360 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
361 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
362 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
363 now.
364
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000365 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000366 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
367 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000368
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000369 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000370 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000371 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
372 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
373 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
374 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000375
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000376 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
377 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
378 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000379 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
380
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000381 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
382 by a later example coded by Guido.
383
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000384 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000385 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
386 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
387 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000388 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
389 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
390
391 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
392 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
393 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
394 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
395 tzinfo subclass instance.
396
397 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
398 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
399 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
400 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
401 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
402 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
403 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
404 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000405
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000406 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
407 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
408 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
409 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
410 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000411 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
412
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000413 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000414
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000415 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
416 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
417 as a naive datetime object.
418
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000419 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
420 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
421 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
422
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000423 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
424 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
425 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
426 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
427 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
428 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
429 comparison.
430
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000431 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
432 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
433 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
434 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000435 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000436
437 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000438
439 and ::
440
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000441 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
442
443 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
444 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
445 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
446 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
447
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000448 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
449 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
450 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
451 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
452 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
453
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000454 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
455 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000456 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
457 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000458
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000459Library
460-------
461
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000462- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
463 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
464
465- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
466 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
467 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
468 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
469 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
470 See PEP 307 for details.
471
472- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
473 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
474
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000475- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
476 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000477 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000478 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
479 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000480 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000481
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000482- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
483 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
484
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000485- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
486 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
487 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
488
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000489- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
490
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000491- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
492 exception.
493
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000494- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
495 class.
496
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000497- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
498 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
499 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
500
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000501- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
502 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
503
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000504- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000505 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
506 See SF bug #659228.
507
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000508- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
509 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
510 See SF patch #651082.
511
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000512- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000513
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000514- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
515 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
516
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000517- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000518 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000519
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000520- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
521 DOS paths from other platforms.
522
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000523Tools/Demos
524-----------
525
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000526- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
527 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
528 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
529 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
530 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
531 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
532 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
533 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
534 example:
535
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000536 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
537 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000538
539 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
540
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000541
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000542Build
543-----
544
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000545- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
546 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
547 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000548 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
549
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000550 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
551
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000552- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
553 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
554 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
555 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
556 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
557 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
558 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
559 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
560 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
561
562- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
563 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
564 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
565 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
566
567- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
568 from the Tools/scripts directory.
569
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000570C API
571-----
572
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000573- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
574 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000575
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000576- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
577 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
578 tp_as_number pointer.
579
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000580- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
581 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
582 (SF #681367)
583
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000584- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
585 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
586 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
587 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000588
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000589Tests
590-----
591
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000592- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000593 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
594 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
595 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
596 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
597 pydoc.)
598
599- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
600
601- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000602
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000603Windows
604-------
605
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000606- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
607 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
608 time).
609
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000610- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
611 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
612
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000613- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
614 release without strong cryptography.
615
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000616- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000617 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000618
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000619- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
620 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
621
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000622Mac
623---
624
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000625- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
626 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000627
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000628- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
629 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
630 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000631
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000632- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
633 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000634
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000635- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
636 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
637 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
638 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000639
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000640- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000641 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
642 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
643 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000644
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000645
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000646What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000647=================================
648
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000649*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000650
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000651Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000652--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000653
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000654- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
655
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000656- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
657 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000658 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000659 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000660 a different meaning than before.
661
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000662- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000663 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000664 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000665
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000666- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000667 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000668 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000669
670- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
671 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
672 and deallocation.
673
674- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
675 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
676
677- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
678 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
679 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
680 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
681 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
682
683- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
684 now detected by the garbage collector.
685
686- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
687 [SF bug 519621]
688
689- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
690 identifier.
691
692- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
693 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
694 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
695 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
696 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
697 [SF bug 563060]
698
699- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
700 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
701 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
702 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
703 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
704
705- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
706 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
707 not called. [SF bug #537450]
708
709- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
710
711- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
712 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
713 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
714 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
715 state of the slots would be lost.)
716
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000717Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000718-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000719
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000720- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000721 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
722 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
723 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
724 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000725 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
726 Jython 2.1.
727
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000728- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000729 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000730 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
731 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
732 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
733 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
734 these, see PEP 302.
735
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000736- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
737 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
738 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
739
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000740- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
741 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
742 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
743
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000744- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
745 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
746 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
747
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000748- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
749 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
750 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
751 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
752 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
753 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
754 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
755 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
756 releases or implementations.
757
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000758- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000759 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
760 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000761
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000762- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
763 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
764
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000765- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
766 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
767 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
768
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000769- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
770 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
771
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000772- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
773 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000774 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
775 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000776
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000777- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
778 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
779 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
780 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
781 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
782
783 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
784 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
785 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
786 pattern.
787
788 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
789 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
790 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
791 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
792
793 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
794 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
795 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
796 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
797 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
798 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
799
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000800- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
801 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
802 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
803 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
804 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
805 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
806 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
807 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000808
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000809- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
810 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
811 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
812 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
813 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000814 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
815 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
816 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
817 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
818 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
819 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
820 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000821
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000822- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
823 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
824
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000825- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
826 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
827 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
828 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
829 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
830 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
831 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
832 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
833 to Zack Weinberg!
834
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000835- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
836 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
837 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
838 type. This has been fixed now.
839
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000840- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
841 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
842 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
843
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000844- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
845 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
846 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
847 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
848 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
849 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
850 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
851 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000852 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000853
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000854- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
855 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
856 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000857
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000858- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
859 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
860 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
861 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
862 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
863 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
864 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
865 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000866 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000867 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
868 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
869
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000870- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
871 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
872 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
873 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
874 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
875 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
876 this.)
877
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000878- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
879 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000880 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000881 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000882 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
883 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000884 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
885 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000886
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000887- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
888 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
889 currently running.
890
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000891- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
892 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
893 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
894 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
895
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000896- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
897 as directory names.
898
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000899- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
900 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
901
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000902- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
903 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
904
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000905- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000906 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
907 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000908
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000909- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
910 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
911 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
912 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
913 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
914
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000915- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
916 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
917 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
918 removed.
919
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000920- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
921 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
922 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
923
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000924- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
925 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
926 to __debug__.
927
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000928- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
929 string to the left with zeros. For example,
930 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
931
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000932- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
933 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
934 deprecated now.
935
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000936- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
937 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
938 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000939
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000940- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
941 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
942 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
943 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
944 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000945
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000946- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
947 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
948
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000949- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
950 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
951 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000952 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000953 is backward compatible.
954
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000955- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
956 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
957 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
958 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
959 could access a pointer to freed memory.
960
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000961- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
962 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
963 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
964 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
965 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
966 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000967
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000968- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
969 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
970
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000971- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
972 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
973
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000974- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
975 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
976 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
977 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
978 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
979
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000980- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
981 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
982 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
983
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000984- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000985 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
986
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000987- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
988 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
989 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000990
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000991- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
992 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
993
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000994- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
995 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
996 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
997
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000998- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
999
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001000Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001001-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001002
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001003- Added three operators to the operator module:
1004 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1005 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1006 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1007
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001008- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1009
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001010- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1011 archives.
1012
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001013- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1014 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1015 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1016
1017 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1018
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001019- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1020 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1021 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001022 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001023
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001024- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1025 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1026 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1027 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001028 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1029 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1030 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1031 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001032
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001033- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1034 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001035
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001036- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1037
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001038- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1039 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1040
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001041- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1042 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1043 supported.
1044
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001045- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1046
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001047- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1048 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001049
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001050- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1051 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1052
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001053- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1054
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001055- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1056 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1057
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001058- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1059 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1060 functions but callable type objects.
1061
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001062- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001063 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001064 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001065
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001066- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1067 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001068
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001069- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1070 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001071
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001072- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1073 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1074 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1075 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1076
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001077- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1078 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001079
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001080- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1081 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1082 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1083 and __imul__.
1084
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001085- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001086 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1087 is called.
1088
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001089- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1090 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1091 interpreter was compiled.
1092
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001093- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1094 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1095 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001096 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001097 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1098 1, not 2.
1099
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001100- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1101 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1102 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1103 limit.
1104
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001105- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1106 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1107 bug #623464.
1108
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001109- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1110 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1111 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1112 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1113
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001114Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001115-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001116
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001117- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1118
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001119- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1120 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1121 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1122 with Python 2.3a2.
1123
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001124- os.path exposes getctime.
1125
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001126- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001127 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001128 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001129 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001130 unit tests of floating point results.
1131
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001132- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1133 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1134 has been increased.
1135
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001136- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1137 executed.
1138
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001139- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1140 postinstallation script.
1141
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001142- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1143 test the current module.
1144
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001145- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001146 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1147 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1148 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1149 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1150
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001151- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001152 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001153 Ward's Optik package.
1154
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001155- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1156 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1157 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1158 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1159
1160- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1161 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001162 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001163
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001164- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1165 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1166 shelf are binary pickles.
1167
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001168- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1169 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1170
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001171- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1172 modules are iterators now.
1173
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001174- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1175 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1176 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1177 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1178 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1179 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001180
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001181- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1182 with their entity value.
1183
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001184- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1185
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001186- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1187 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001188
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001189- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1190 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001191 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001192
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001193- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1194 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1195 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1196 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1197 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1198 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1199 main():
1200
1201 import locale
1202 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1203
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001204- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1205 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1206
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001207- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1208 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1209 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1210 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1211 to the new standard.
1212
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001213- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1214 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1215 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1216 an extension to the database.
1217
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001218- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1219 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1220 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1221 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001222 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001223
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001224- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001225 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001226
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001227- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1228 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1229 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1230 bounded integers.
1231
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001232- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1233 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1234 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1235 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1236 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1237 in existence.
1238
1239 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1240 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1241 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1242 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1243 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1244 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1245
1246 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1247 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1248 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1249 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1250
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001251- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1252 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1253 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1254
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001255- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1256
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001257- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1258 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1259 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1260 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1261
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001262- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1263 argument.
1264
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001265- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1266 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1267 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1268 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1269 [SF patch 560794].
1270
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001271- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1272 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1273 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001274 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1275 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1276 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001277
1278- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1279 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001280
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001281- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1282 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1283 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1284 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001285
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001286- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1287 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1288 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1289 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1290 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1291
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001292- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001293
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001294- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1295
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001296- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1297 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1298 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1299 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1300 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1301 identical to None.
1302
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001303- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1304 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1305 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1306 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1307 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1308 results now.
1309
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001310- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1311 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1312
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001313- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1314 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1315 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1316 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1317 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1318 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1319 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1320 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1321
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001322- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1323
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001324- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1325 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1326
1327- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1328 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1329 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1330 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1331 and other systems.
1332
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001333- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1334 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1335 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1336 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 +00001337 work well with these.
1338
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001339- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1340
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001341- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001342 connections.
1343
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001344- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1345 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1346 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1347
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001348- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1349 sets
1350
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001351- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1352 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1353 name.
1354
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001355- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1356 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1357 passed in.
1358
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001359- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001360 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001361 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1362 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001363
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001364- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1365
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001366- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1367
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001368- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1369 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1370 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1371
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001372- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1373 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1374 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1375 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001376 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001377
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001378- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001379 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001380 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001381
1382- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1383 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1384 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1385
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001386- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001387 the value of its expression argument.
1388
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001389- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1390 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1391 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1392
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001393- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1394 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1395 skipstone browser was included.
1396
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001397- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1398 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1399
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001400Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001401-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001402
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001403- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1404 names in addition to accepting file names.
1405
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001406- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1407 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1408 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1409 still used and useful.)
1410
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001411- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1412 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1413 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1414 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001415
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001416- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1417 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1418 the generated binary.
1419
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001420Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001421-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001422
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001423- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1424
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001425- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1426 except in the hands of experts.
1427
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001428- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001429 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1430 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1431 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001432
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001433- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1434 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1435 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1436 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1437 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1438 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1439 builds.
1440
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001441- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1442 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1443 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1444 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1445 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1446 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1447 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1448 new type.
1449
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001450- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001451
1452 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1453 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1454 positive infinities.
1455
1456 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1457 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1458 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1459 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1460 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1461 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1462 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1463
1464 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1465
1466 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1467
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001468- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1469 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1470 size of the executable.
1471
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001472- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1473 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1474 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1475 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001476
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001477- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1478
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001479- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1480 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1481 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001482
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001483- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1484 well as Unix.
1485
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001486- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1487 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1488 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1489 modules in the README file for details.
1490
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001491C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001492-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001493
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001494- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1495 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001496 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001497 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001498 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001499
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001500- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1501 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1502 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1503 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1504 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1505 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001506 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001507 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1508 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1509 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1510 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1511 aligned.)
1512
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001513- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1514 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1515 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1516
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001517- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1518 level.
1519
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001520- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1521 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1522 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1523 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1524 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1525
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001526- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1527 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1528 code.
1529
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001530- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1531 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1532 adjusting for negative indices.
1533
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001534- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1535 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1536 object.
1537
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001538- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1539 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1540 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1541
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001542- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1543 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001544
1545- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1546
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001547- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1548 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1549 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1550 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1551
1552- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1553
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001554- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001555
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001556- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001557 without going through the buffer API.
1558
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001559- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001560
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001561- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1562 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1563 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1564 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1565
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001566- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1567 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1568
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001569- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001570 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1571
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001572New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001573-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001574
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001575- OpenVMS is now supported.
1576
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001577- AtheOS is now supported.
1578
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001579- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1580
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001581- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1582
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001583Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001584-----
1585
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001586- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1587 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1588 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001589
1590Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001591-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001592
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001593- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1594 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1595 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1596 bugs.
1597 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001598 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001599 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1600 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001601 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001602
1603- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001604 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001605
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001606- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1607 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1608
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001609- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1610 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001611 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001612 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1613
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001614- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1615 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1616 use files" uninstall option).
1617
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001618- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1619
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001620- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1621 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1622
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001623- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1624 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1625 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1626
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001627- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1628 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1629 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1630 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1631 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001632 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1633 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1634 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001635
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001636- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001637 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001638 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1639 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1640 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1641 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1642 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1643 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1644 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1645 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1646 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1647 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1648 work around.
1649
1650- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1651 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1652 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1653 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1654 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1655 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1656 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1657 specified with O_CREAT too).
1658
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001659Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001660----
1661
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001662- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001663
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001664- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1665 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1666 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1667
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001668- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1669 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1670 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1671
1672- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1673 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1674 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1675 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1676 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1677 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1678 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1679 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001680
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001681- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1682 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1683 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001684
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001685- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1686 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1687 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1688 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1689 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001690
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001691- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1692 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1693 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001694
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001695- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1696 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001697
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001698- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1699 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1700 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1701 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1702 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001703
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001704- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1705 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1706 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1707
1708- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1709 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1710 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001711
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001712- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1713 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1714 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1715 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001716 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001717
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001718- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1719 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001720
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001721- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1722 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001723
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001724- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001725 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001726 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1727 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001728
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001729
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001730What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001731===============================
1732
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001733*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1734
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001735Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001736--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001737
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001738- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1739 with a custom metaclass.
1740
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001741Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001742-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001743
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001744- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1745 are proxies.
1746
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001747Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001748-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001749
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001750- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1751 very short strings.
1752
1753- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1754 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1755 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1756 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1757 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1758
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001759Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001760-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001761
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001762- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1763 close or delete time).
1764
1765- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1766 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1767
1768- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1769
1770- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001771 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001772
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001773Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001774-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001775
1776Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001777-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001778
1779C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001780-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001781
1782New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001783-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001784
1785Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001786-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001787
1788Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001789-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001790
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001791- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1792
1793- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1794 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1795
1796- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1797 deleted at process exit time.
1798
1799- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1800 in backslash.
1801
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001802Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001803----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001804
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001805- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1806 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1807 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1808
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001809
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001810What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001811===========================
1812
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001813*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1814
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001815Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001816--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001817
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001818- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1819 been extensively updated. See
1820
1821 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1822
1823 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1824
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001825- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1826 deleted!
1827
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001828- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1829 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1830 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1831 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1832 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1833
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001834- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1835
1836 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1837 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1838
1839 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1840 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1841 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1842 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1843 supported anyway.
1844
1845 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1846 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1847
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001848- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1849 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1850 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1851 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1852 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001853
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001854- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1855 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1856 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1857
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001858Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001859-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001860
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001861- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1862 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1863 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1864 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1865 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1866 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001867 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1868 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1869 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1870 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001871
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001872- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1873 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1874 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1875
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001876Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001877-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001878
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001879- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1880
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001881Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001882-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001883
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001884- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1885 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1886 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1887 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1888 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1889 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1890
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001891- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1892
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001893- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1894
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001895- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1896
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001897- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1898 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1899 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1900
1901- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1902
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001903Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001904-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001905
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001906- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1907 off a search on Google.
1908
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001909Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001910-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001911
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001912- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1913 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1914 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1915 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1916 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1917 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1918 other platforms should do likewise.
1919
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001920- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1921 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1922 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1923
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001924C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001925-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001926
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001927- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1928 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1929 producing key-value pairs.
1930
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001931- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001932 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001933 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1934 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1935 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1936 previously went unchallenged.
1937
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001938New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001939-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001940
1941Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001942-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001943
1944Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001945-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001946
1947Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001948----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001949
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001950- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1951 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001952
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001953- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1954 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1955 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1956 home.
1957
1958
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001959What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001960===========================
1961
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001962*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1963
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001964Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001965--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001966
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001967- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1968 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001969
1970 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001971 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001972
1973 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1974 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001975 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001976 This needs to be documented.
1977
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001978- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1979 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1980
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001981- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1982 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1983 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1984
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001985- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1986 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1987
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001988- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1989 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1990 class forbids it).
1991
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001992- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1993 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1994 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1995
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001996- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1997
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001998Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001999-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002000
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002001- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2002 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002003 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002004
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002005- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2006 (like 1 + '').
2007
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002008Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002009-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002010
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002011- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2012 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2013 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2014 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002015 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002016 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2017
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002018- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2019 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2020 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2021 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2022
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002023- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2024 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002025 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2026 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2027 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002028
2029- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2030 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002031
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002032- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2033 bytes on its input.
2034
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002035Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002036-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002037
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002038- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002039 convenience function.
2040
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002041- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2042 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2043 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002044 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2045 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2046 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2047 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2048 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2049 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002050
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002051- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2052 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2053 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2054 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2055
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002056- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2057 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2058 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2059
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002060- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2061 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2062 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2063 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2064
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002065- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2066 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002067 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002068 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2069 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2070 new -l and -e options.
2071
2072- statcache is now deprecated.
2073
2074- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2075 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002076 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002077 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2078 time properly taken into account.
2079
2080- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2081 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2082 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2083 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2084
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002085Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002086-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002087
2088Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002089-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002090
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002091- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2092 is built with libdb3 if available.
2093
2094- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2095
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002096C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002097-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002098
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002099- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2100 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2101 PySequence_Size().
2102
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002103- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2104
2105- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2106 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2107 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2108
2109- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2110 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2111
2112- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2113 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2114
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002115New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002116-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002117
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002118- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2119 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2120
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002121- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2122 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2123
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002124- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2125
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002126Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002127-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002128
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002129- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2130 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2131
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002132Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002133-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002134
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002135Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002136----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002137
2138- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2139 removed completely in the next release.
2140
2141- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2142 OSX.
2143
2144- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2145 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2146
2147- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2148
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002149
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002150What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002151===========================
2152
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002153*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2154
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002155Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002156--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002157
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002158- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002159 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002160 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002161 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2162 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002163 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2164 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002165 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2166 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002167
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002168- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2169 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2170
2171- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2172 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2173
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002174Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002175-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002176
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002177- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2178 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2179 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2180 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2181 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2182 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2183 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2184 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2185
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002186- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2187 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2188 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2189 example).
2190
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002191- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002192 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002193 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002194 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002195
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002196- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2197 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2198 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002199 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002200
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002201- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2202 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2203 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2204 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2205 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2206 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2207
2208 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2209
2210 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2211
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002212Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002213-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002214
2215- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2216
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002217- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2218
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002219- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2220 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002221
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002222- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2223 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2224 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2225 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2226 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2227 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002228 attributes.
2229
2230- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2231 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2232 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002233
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002234- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2235 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2236 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002237
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002238- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2239 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2240 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002241 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2242 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2243
2244- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2245 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002246
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002247Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002248-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002249
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002250- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2251 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2252
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002253- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2254 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2255 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2256 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2257
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002258- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2259 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2260 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2261 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2262
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002263 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2264 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2265 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2266 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2267 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2268 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2269 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2270 without losing information).
2271
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002272- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002273 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2274 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2275 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2276 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2277 module).
2278
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002279 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002280 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2281 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2282 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2283 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002284
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002285- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002286 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2287 encoding.
2288
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002289- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2290 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2291
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002292- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002293 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2294
2295- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2296 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2297 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2298 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2299
2300- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2301
2302- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2303 ON, and OFF.
2304
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002305- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2306 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2307
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002308Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002309-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002310
2311- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2312 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2313 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002314
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002315- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2316 been added: -X and -E.
2317
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002318Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002319-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002320
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002321- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2322 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2323
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002324C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002325-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002326
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002327- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2328 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2329 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2330 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2331 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2332
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002333- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2334 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2335 as long) arguments.
2336
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002337- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2338 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2339 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2340 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2341 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2342 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2343
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002344- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2345 input.
2346
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002347New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002348-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002349
2350Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002351-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002352
2353Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002354-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002355
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002356- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2357 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2358 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2359
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002360- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2361 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2362 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002363 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002364
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002365 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2366 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2367 import signal
2368 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002369
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002370 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002371 while 1:
2372 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002373 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002374 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2375 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2376 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2377 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002378
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002379
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002380What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2381===========================
2382
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002383*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2384
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002385Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002386--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002387
2388- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2389 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2390 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2391
2392- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2393 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2394 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2395 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2396 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2397 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2398 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002399
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002400- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002401 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002402 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2403 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2404 associate a docstring with a property.
2405
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002406- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2407 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2408 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2409 other built-in object types.
2410
2411- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2412 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2413 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2414 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2415 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2416
2417- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2418 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2419
2420- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2421 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002422 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002423 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2424 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2425 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2426 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2427 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2428
2429- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2430 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2431 class.
2432
2433- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2434 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2435 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2436 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2437
2438- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2439 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2440 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2441 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2442
2443- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2444 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2445
2446- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2447 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2448 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2449 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2450 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002451 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002452 with the same value as s.
2453
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002454- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2455
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002456Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002457----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002458
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002459- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2460
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002461- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2462 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2463 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2464 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2465 objects.
2466
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002467- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2468 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002469 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2470 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2471
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002472- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2473 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2474 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2475
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002476Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002477-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002478
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002479- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2480 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2481 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2482 by the instances.
2483
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002484- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2485 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2486 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2487
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002488- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2489 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2490 before the entire comparison is complete.
2491
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002492- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2493 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2494 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2495
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002496- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2497 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2498 getwriter().
2499
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002500- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2501 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2502
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002503- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002504 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2505 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2506
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002507- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2508 iterable object.
2509
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002510- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2511 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002512
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002513- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2514 authentication.
2515
2516- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2517 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002518
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002519- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002520 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2521 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2522 a sample driver.)
2523
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002524Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002525-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002526
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002527- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2528 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2529 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2530 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2531 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2532 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2533 kernel has large file support.
2534
2535- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2536 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2537 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2538 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2539 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2540
2541- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2542 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2543 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2544
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002545C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002546-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002547
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002548- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2549 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2550
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002551New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002552-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002553
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002554- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2555 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2556
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002557Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002558-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002559
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002560- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2561 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2562 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2563 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2564 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2565
2566- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2567 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2568 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2569 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2570
2571- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2572 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2573
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002574Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002575-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002576
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002577- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002578 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2579 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002580
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002581
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002582What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2583===========================
2584
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002585*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2586
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002587Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002588----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002589
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002590- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2591 big to represent as a C double.
2592
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002593- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2594 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2595 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2596 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2597 restriction).
2598
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002599- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2600 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2601 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2602 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2603 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2604
2605 >>> dir([])
2606 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2607 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2608 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2609 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2610 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2611 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2612 'reverse', 'sort']
2613
2614 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2615
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002616- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002617 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2618 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2619 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2620 OverflowError exception.
2621
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002622- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002623 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002624 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2625 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2626 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2627 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2628 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002629 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002630 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2631 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2632
2633 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2634 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2635 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2636 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002637
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002638- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002639 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2640 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2641 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2642 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2643 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2644 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2645 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2646 once it is created.
2647
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002648- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2649 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2650 (key, value) pairs.
2651
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002652- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002653 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2654 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2655
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002656- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2657 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2658 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2659 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2660 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002661
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002662- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002663 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2664 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2665
2666 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2667
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002668- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002669 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2670
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002671Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002672-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002673
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002674- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002675 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2676 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002677
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002678- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2679 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2680 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2681 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2682 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2683 in this area anymore).
2684
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002685- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2686 threading.Timer.
2687
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002688- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2689 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2690
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002691- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002692 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2693
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002694- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002695 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2696 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2697 converted to Python longs.
2698
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002699- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002700 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2701
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002702- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2703 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2704 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2705
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002706Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002707-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002708
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002709- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2710 division operators as per PEP 238.
2711
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002712Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002713-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002714
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002715- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2716 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2717 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2718 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2719
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002720C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002721-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002722
2723- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002724
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002725- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2726 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002727 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002728
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002729 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2730 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002731 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002732 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002733
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002734- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002735 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2736 module:
2737
2738 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002739
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002740 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2741 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002742
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002743 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2744 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002745
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002746 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2747
2748 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2749
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002750- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002751 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2752 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2753 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002754
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002755New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002756-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002757
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002758- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2759 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2760 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2761 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2762 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002763
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002764Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002765-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002766
2767Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002768-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002769
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002770- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2771 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2772 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2773 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002774 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2775 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2776 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2777 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2778 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002779
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002780- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002781 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2782
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002783
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002784What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2785===========================
2786
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002787*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2788
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002789Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002790-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002791
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002792- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2793 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2794
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002795- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2796 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2797 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002798
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002799- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2800 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2801 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2802 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002803
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002804- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2805
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002806- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002807
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002808Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002809-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002810
2811- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002812 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002813 the module docstring for details.
2814
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002815Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002816-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002817
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002818- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002819 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2820 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2821 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002822
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002823- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2824 Nick Mathewson.
2825
2826Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002827----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002828
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002829- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2830 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2831 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2832 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2833 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2834 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2835 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2836 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2837
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002838- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2839 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2840 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2841 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2842
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002843- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2844 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2845 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2846 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2847 come a long way).
2848
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002849- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2850 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2851 write filters for these warnings).
2852
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002853- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2854 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2855 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2856 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2857 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2858
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002859- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2860 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2861 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2862 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2863 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2864 older distribution.
2865
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002866Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002867-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002868
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002869- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2870 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002871 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002872
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002873- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2874 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2875 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2876
2877- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2878
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002879- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2880
2881- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2882
2883- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2884
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002885- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002886
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002887- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2888
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002889New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002890-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002891
2892C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002893-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002894
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002895- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2896 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2897 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2898 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2899 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2900 against buffer overruns.
2901
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002902- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002903 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2904 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002905 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2906 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2907 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2908
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002909- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2910 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2911 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2912 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2913 deprecated.
2914
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002915Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002916-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002917
2918- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2919 relevant is found.
2920
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002921
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002922What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002923===========================
2924
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002925*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2926
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002927Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002928----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002929
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002930- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2931 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2932 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2933 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2934 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2935 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2936 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2937 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002938 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002939 repaired.
2940
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002941- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002942 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002943 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2944 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2945 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2946 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2947 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2948 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2949 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2950 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2951
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002952- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2953 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2954 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2955 leading BMO character).
2956
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002957- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2958 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2959 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2960
2961 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2962 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2963 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002964
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002965 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2966 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2967 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2968 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2969 for various simple to use conversions.
2970
2971 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2972 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2973
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002974 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2975 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2976 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2977 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2978 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2979 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2980 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2981 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2982 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2983 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2984 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2985 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2986 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2987 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2988 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002989
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002990- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2991 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2992 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002993 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002994 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002995
2996 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002997 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2998 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2999 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3000 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3001 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003002 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3003 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003004
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003005 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3006 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3007 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003008 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003009
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003010- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3011 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3012 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3013 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3014 floating arithmetic,
3015
3016 x = 9007199254740992.0
3017 print long(x)
3018
3019 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3020 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3021 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3022 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3023 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3024 functions are of good quality).
3025
3026 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3027 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3028 algorithms to break.
3029
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003030- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3031 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3032 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3033 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3034 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3035 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3036 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3037 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3038 order.
3039
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003040- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3041 operation along the most common code paths.
3042
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003043- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3044 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3045
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003046- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3047 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3048 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3049 {}.update(UserDict())
3050
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003051- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3052 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3053 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3054 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3055 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3056 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3057 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3058 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3059
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003060- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003061 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003062
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003063 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003064 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3065 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003066 join() method of strings
3067 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003068 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3069 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003070 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003071 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003072
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003073- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3074 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3075
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003076- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3077 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3078
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003079- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3080 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3081 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3082 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3083
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003084- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3085 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003086 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003087 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3088 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003089
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003090- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3091
3092
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003093Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003094-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003095
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003096- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003097 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003098 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3099 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3100
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003101- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3102 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3103
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003104- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3105 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3106 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3107 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3108
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003109- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3110 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3111 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3112
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003113- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3114
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003115- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3116
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003117- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3118 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3119 that are still imported into string.py).
3120
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003121- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3122
3123- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3124 Now it does.
3125
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003126- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3127
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003128- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3129 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3130 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3131 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3132 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003133 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3134 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003135
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003136- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3137 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3138 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3139 'help(object)'.
3140
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003141Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003142-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003143
3144- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003145 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003146 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3147 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3148
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003149- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003150 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3151 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003152
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003153C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003154-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003155
3156- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3157 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003158
3159----
3160
3161**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**