blob: 877fb9e3b3fea28507177c4e7980ba26ddec5465 [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
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000015- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
16 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
17 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
18 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
19 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
20
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000021- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
22 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000023
24- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
25 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
26 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
27 #693195.)
28
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000029- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
30 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000031
32Extension modules
33-----------------
34
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +000035- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
36 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
37 See SF bug #692416.
38
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +000039- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
40 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
41
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +000042- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
43 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
44 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000045
46Library
47-------
48
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +000049- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
50 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
51
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +000052- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
53 execution speed of expressions and statements.
54
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +000055- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
56 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
57 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
58 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
59 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
60 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
61
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +000062- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
63 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
64 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000065
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +000066- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
67 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
68 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
69
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000070Tools/Demos
71-----------
72
73TBD
74
75Build
76-----
77
Neal Norwitz2c92c6e2003-02-28 17:24:00 +000078- Fix build problems when _iconv_codec failed. (SF bug #690012.)
79
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +000080- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
81 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000082
83C API
84-----
85
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +000086- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
87 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
88 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000089
90New platforms
91-------------
92
93TBD
94
95Tests
96-----
97
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +000098- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
99 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000100
101Windows
102-------
103
104TBD
105
106Mac
107---
108
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000109- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
110 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000111
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000112- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
113 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000114
Jack Jansen4213e272003-02-27 22:52:58 +0000115- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000116
117
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000118What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
119=================================
120
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000121*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000122
123Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000124-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000125
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000126- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
127 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
128 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
129
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000130- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
131 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
132 (SF patch #664376.)
133
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000134- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
135 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
136 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
137 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
138 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
139 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000140 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000141
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000142- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
143 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
144 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
145 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000146 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000147
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000148- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
149 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
150 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
151 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
152 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
153 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
154 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
155 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
156 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
157 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
158 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
159
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000160- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
161 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
162 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
163 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
164 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
165 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
166
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000167- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
168 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
169
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000170- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
171 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
172 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
173 case.)
174
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000175- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
176 passed as unicode strings.
177
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000178- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
179 See SF bug #683467.
180
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000181- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
182 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
183
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000184- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
185
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000186- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
187
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000188- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
189 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
190 arguments.
191
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000192- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
193 See SF bug #667147.
194
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000195- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000196 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000197 See SF bug #676155.
198
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000199- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000200 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000201 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
202 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
203 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
204 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
205 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
206 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000207
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000208Extension modules
209-----------------
210
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000211- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
212 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
213 tp_as_number pointer.
214
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000215- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
216 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
217 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
218 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
219 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
220
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000221- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
222
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000223- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
224
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000225- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000226 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000227 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
228 patch #678531.)
229
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000230- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
231 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
232
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000233- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
234 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
235
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +0000236- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
237 library.
238
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000239- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
240
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000241- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
242 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
243 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
244
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000245- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
246
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000247- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
248 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
249
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000250- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000251
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000252- datetime changes:
253
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000254 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
255 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
256 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
257 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
258 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
259 now.
260
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000261 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000262 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
263 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000264
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000265 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000266 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000267 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
268 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
269 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
270 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000271
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000272 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
273 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
274 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000275 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
276
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000277 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
278 by a later example coded by Guido.
279
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000280 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000281 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
282 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
283 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000284 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
285 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
286
287 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
288 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
289 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
290 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
291 tzinfo subclass instance.
292
293 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
294 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
295 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
296 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
297 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
298 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
299 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
300 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000301
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000302 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
303 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
304 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
305 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
306 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000307 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
308
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000309 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000310
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000311 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
312 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
313 as a naive datetime object.
314
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000315 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
316 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
317 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
318
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000319 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
320 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
321 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
322 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
323 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
324 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
325 comparison.
326
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000327 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
328 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
329 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
330 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000331 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000332
333 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000334
335 and ::
336
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000337 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
338
339 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
340 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
341 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
342 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
343
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000344 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
345 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
346 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
347 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
348 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
349
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000350 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
351 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000352 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
353 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000354
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000355Library
356-------
357
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000358- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
359 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
360
361- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
362 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
363 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
364 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
365 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
366 See PEP 307 for details.
367
368- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
369 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
370
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000371- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
372 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000373 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000374 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
375 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000376 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000377
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000378- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
379 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
380
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000381- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
382 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
383 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
384
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000385- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
386
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000387- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
388 exception.
389
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000390- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
391 class.
392
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000393- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
394 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
395 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
396
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000397- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
398 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
399
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000400- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000401 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
402 See SF bug #659228.
403
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000404- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
405 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
406 See SF patch #651082.
407
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000408- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000409
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000410- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
411 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
412
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000413- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000414 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000415
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000416- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
417 DOS paths from other platforms.
418
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000419Tools/Demos
420-----------
421
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000422- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
423 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
424 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
425 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
426 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
427 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
428 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
429 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
430 example:
431
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000432 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
433 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000434
435 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
436
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000437
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000438Build
439-----
440
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000441- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
442 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
443 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000444 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
445
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000446 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
447
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000448- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
449 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
450 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
451 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
452 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
453 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
454 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
455 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
456 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
457
458- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
459 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
460 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
461 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
462
463- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
464 from the Tools/scripts directory.
465
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000466C API
467-----
468
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000469- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
470 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000471
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000472- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
473 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
474 tp_as_number pointer.
475
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000476- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
477 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
478 (SF #681367)
479
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000480- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
481 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
482 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
483 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000484
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000485Tests
486-----
487
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000488- Several tests weren't being run rom regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
489 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
490 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
491 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
492 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
493 pydoc.)
494
495- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
496
497- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000498
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000499Windows
500-------
501
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000502- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
503 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
504 time).
505
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000506- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
507 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
508
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000509- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
510 release without strong cryptography.
511
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000512- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000513 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000514
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000515- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
516 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
517
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000518Mac
519---
520
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000521- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
522 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000523
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000524- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
525 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
526 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000527
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000528- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
529 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000530
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000531- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
532 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
533 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
534 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000535
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000536- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000537 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
538 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
539 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000541
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000542What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000543=================================
544
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000545*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000546
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000547Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000548--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000549
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000550- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
551
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000552- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
553 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000554 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000555 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000556 a different meaning than before.
557
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000558- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000559 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000560 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000561
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000562- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000563 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000564 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000565
566- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
567 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
568 and deallocation.
569
570- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
571 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
572
573- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
574 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
575 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
576 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
577 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
578
579- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
580 now detected by the garbage collector.
581
582- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
583 [SF bug 519621]
584
585- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
586 identifier.
587
588- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
589 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
590 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
591 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
592 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
593 [SF bug 563060]
594
595- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
596 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
597 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
598 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
599 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
600
601- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
602 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
603 not called. [SF bug #537450]
604
605- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
606
607- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
608 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
609 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
610 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
611 state of the slots would be lost.)
612
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000613Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000614-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000615
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000616- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000617 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
618 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
619 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
620 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000621 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
622 Jython 2.1.
623
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000624- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000625 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000626 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
627 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
628 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
629 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
630 these, see PEP 302.
631
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000632- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
633 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
634 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
635
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000636- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
637 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
638 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
639
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000640- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
641 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
642 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
643
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000644- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
645 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
646 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
647 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
648 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
649 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
650 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
651 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
652 releases or implementations.
653
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000654- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000655 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
656 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000657
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000658- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
659 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
660
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000661- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
662 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
663 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
664
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000665- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
666 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
667
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000668- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
669 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000670 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
671 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000672
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000673- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
674 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
675 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
676 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
677 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
678
679 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
680 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
681 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
682 pattern.
683
684 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
685 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
686 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
687 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
688
689 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
690 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
691 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
692 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
693 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
694 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
695
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000696- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
697 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
698 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
699 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
700 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
701 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
702 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
703 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000704
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000705- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
706 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
707 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
708 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
709 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000710 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
711 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
712 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
713 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
714 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
715 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
716 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000717
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000718- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
719 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
720
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000721- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
722 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
723 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
724 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
725 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
726 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
727 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
728 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
729 to Zack Weinberg!
730
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000731- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
732 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
733 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
734 type. This has been fixed now.
735
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000736- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
737 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
738 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
739
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000740- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
741 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
742 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
743 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
744 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
745 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
746 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
747 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000748 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000749
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000750- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
751 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
752 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000753
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000754- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
755 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
756 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
757 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
758 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
759 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
760 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
761 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000762 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000763 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
764 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
765
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000766- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
767 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
768 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
769 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
770 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
771 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
772 this.)
773
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000774- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
775 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000776 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000777 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000778 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
779 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000780 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
781 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000782
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000783- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
784 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
785 currently running.
786
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000787- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
788 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
789 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
790 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
791
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000792- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
793 as directory names.
794
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000795- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
796 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
797
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000798- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
799 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
800
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000801- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000802 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
803 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000804
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000805- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
806 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
807 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
808 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
809 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
810
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000811- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
812 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
813 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
814 removed.
815
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000816- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
817 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
818 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
819
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000820- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
821 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
822 to __debug__.
823
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000824- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
825 string to the left with zeros. For example,
826 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
827
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000828- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
829 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
830 deprecated now.
831
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000832- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
833 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
834 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000835
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000836- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
837 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
838 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
839 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
840 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000841
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000842- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
843 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
844
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000845- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
846 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
847 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000848 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000849 is backward compatible.
850
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000851- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
852 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
853 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
854 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
855 could access a pointer to freed memory.
856
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000857- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
858 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
859 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
860 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
861 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
862 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000863
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000864- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
865 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
866
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000867- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
868 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
869
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000870- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
871 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
872 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
873 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
874 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
875
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000876- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
877 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
878 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
879
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000880- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000881 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
882
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000883- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
884 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
885 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000886
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000887- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
888 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
889
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000890- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
891 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
892 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
893
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000894- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
895
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000896Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000897-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000898
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000899- Added three operators to the operator module:
900 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
901 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
902 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
903
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000904- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
905
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000906- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
907 archives.
908
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000909- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
910 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
911 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
912
913 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
914
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000915- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
916 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
917 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000918 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000919
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000920- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
921 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
922 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
923 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000924 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
925 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
926 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
927 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000928
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000929- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
930 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000931
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000932- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
933
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000934- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
935 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
936
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000937- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
938 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
939 supported.
940
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000941- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
942
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000943- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
944 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000945
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000946- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
947 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
948
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000949- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
950
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000951- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
952 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
953
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000954- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
955 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
956 functions but callable type objects.
957
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000958- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000959 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000960 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000961
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000962- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
963 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000964
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000965- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
966 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000967
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000968- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
969 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
970 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
971 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
972
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000973- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
974 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000975
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000976- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
977 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
978 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
979 and __imul__.
980
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000981- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000982 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
983 is called.
984
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000985- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
986 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
987 interpreter was compiled.
988
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000989- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
990 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
991 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000992 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000993 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
994 1, not 2.
995
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000996- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
997 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
998 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
999 limit.
1000
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001001- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1002 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1003 bug #623464.
1004
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001005- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1006 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1007 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1008 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1009
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001010Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001011-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001012
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001013- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1014
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001015- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1016 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1017 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1018 with Python 2.3a2.
1019
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001020- os.path exposes getctime.
1021
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001022- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001023 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001024 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001025 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001026 unit tests of floating point results.
1027
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001028- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1029 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1030 has been increased.
1031
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001032- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1033 executed.
1034
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001035- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1036 postinstallation script.
1037
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001038- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1039 test the current module.
1040
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001041- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001042 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1043 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1044 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1045 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1046
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001047- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001048 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001049 Ward's Optik package.
1050
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001051- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1052 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1053 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1054 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1055
1056- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1057 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001058 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001059
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001060- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1061 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1062 shelf are binary pickles.
1063
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001064- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1065 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1066
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001067- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1068 modules are iterators now.
1069
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001070- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1071 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1072 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1073 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1074 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1075 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001076
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001077- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1078 with their entity value.
1079
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001080- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1081
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001082- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1083 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001084
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001085- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1086 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001087 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001088
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001089- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1090 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1091 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1092 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1093 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1094 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1095 main():
1096
1097 import locale
1098 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1099
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001100- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1101 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1102
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001103- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1104 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1105 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1106 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1107 to the new standard.
1108
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001109- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1110 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1111 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1112 an extension to the database.
1113
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001114- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1115 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1116 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1117 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001118 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001119
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001120- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001121 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001122
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001123- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1124 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1125 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1126 bounded integers.
1127
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001128- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1129 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1130 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1131 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1132 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1133 in existence.
1134
1135 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1136 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1137 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1138 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1139 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1140 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1141
1142 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1143 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1144 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1145 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1146
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001147- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1148 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1149 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1150
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001151- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1152
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001153- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1154 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1155 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1156 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1157
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001158- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1159 argument.
1160
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001161- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1162 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1163 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1164 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1165 [SF patch 560794].
1166
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001167- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1168 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1169 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001170 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1171 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1172 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001173
1174- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1175 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001176
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001177- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1178 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1179 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1180 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001181
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001182- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1183 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1184 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1185 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1186 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1187
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001188- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001189
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001190- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1191
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001192- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1193 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1194 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1195 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1196 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1197 identical to None.
1198
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001199- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1200 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1201 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1202 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1203 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1204 results now.
1205
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001206- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1207 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1208
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001209- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1210 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1211 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1212 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1213 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1214 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1215 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1216 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1217
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001218- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1219
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001220- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1221 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1222
1223- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1224 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1225 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1226 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1227 and other systems.
1228
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001229- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1230 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1231 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1232 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 +00001233 work well with these.
1234
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001235- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1236
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001237- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001238 connections.
1239
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001240- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1241 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1242 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1243
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001244- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1245 sets
1246
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001247- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1248 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1249 name.
1250
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001251- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1252 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1253 passed in.
1254
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001255- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001256 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001257 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1258 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001259
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001260- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1261
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001262- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1263
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001264- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1265 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1266 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1267
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001268- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1269 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1270 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1271 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001272 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001273
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001274- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001275 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001276 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001277
1278- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1279 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1280 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1281
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001282- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001283 the value of its expression argument.
1284
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001285- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1286 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1287 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1288
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001289- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1290 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1291 skipstone browser was included.
1292
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001293- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1294 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1295
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001296Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001297-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001298
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001299- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1300 names in addition to accepting file names.
1301
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001302- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1303 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1304 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1305 still used and useful.)
1306
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001307- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1308 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1309 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1310 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001311
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001312- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1313 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1314 the generated binary.
1315
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001316Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001317-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001318
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001319- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1320
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001321- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1322 except in the hands of experts.
1323
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001324- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001325 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1326 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1327 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001328
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001329- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1330 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1331 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1332 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1333 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1334 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1335 builds.
1336
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001337- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1338 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1339 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1340 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1341 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1342 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1343 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1344 new type.
1345
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001346- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001347
1348 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1349 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1350 positive infinities.
1351
1352 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1353 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1354 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1355 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1356 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1357 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1358 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1359
1360 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1361
1362 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1363
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001364- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1365 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1366 size of the executable.
1367
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001368- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1369 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1370 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1371 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001372
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001373- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1374
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001375- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1376 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1377 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001378
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001379- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1380 well as Unix.
1381
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001382- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1383 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1384 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1385 modules in the README file for details.
1386
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001387C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001388-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001389
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001390- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1391 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001392 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001393 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001394 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001395
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001396- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1397 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1398 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1399 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1400 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1401 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001402 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001403 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1404 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1405 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1406 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1407 aligned.)
1408
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001409- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1410 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1411 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1412
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001413- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1414 level.
1415
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001416- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1417 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1418 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1419 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1420 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1421
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001422- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1423 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1424 code.
1425
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001426- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1427 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1428 adjusting for negative indices.
1429
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001430- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1431 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1432 object.
1433
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001434- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1435 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1436 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1437
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001438- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1439 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001440
1441- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1442
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001443- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1444 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1445 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1446 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1447
1448- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1449
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001450- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001451
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001452- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001453 without going through the buffer API.
1454
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001455- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001456
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001457- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1458 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1459 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1460 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1461
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001462- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1463 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1464
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001465- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001466 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1467
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001468New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001469-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001470
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001471- OpenVMS is now supported.
1472
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001473- AtheOS is now supported.
1474
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001475- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1476
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001477- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1478
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001479Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001480-----
1481
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001482- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1483 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1484 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001485
1486Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001487-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001488
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001489- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1490 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1491 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1492 bugs.
1493 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001494 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001495 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1496 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001497 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001498
1499- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001500 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001501
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001502- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1503 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1504
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001505- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1506 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001507 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001508 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1509
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001510- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1511 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1512 use files" uninstall option).
1513
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001514- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1515
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001516- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1517 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1518
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001519- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1520 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1521 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1522
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001523- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1524 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1525 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1526 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1527 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001528 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1529 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1530 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001531
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001532- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001533 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001534 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1535 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1536 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1537 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1538 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1539 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1540 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1541 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1542 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1543 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1544 work around.
1545
1546- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1547 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1548 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1549 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1550 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1551 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1552 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1553 specified with O_CREAT too).
1554
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001555Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001556----
1557
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001558- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001559
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001560- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1561 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1562 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1563
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001564- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1565 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1566 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1567
1568- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1569 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1570 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1571 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1572 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1573 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1574 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1575 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001576
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001577- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1578 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1579 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001580
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001581- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1582 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1583 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1584 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1585 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001586
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001587- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1588 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1589 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001590
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001591- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1592 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001593
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001594- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1595 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1596 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1597 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1598 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001599
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001600- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1601 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1602 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1603
1604- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1605 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1606 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001607
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001608- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1609 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1610 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1611 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001612 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001613
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001614- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1615 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001616
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001617- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1618 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001619
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001620- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001621 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001622 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1623 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001624
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001625
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001626What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001627===============================
1628
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001629*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1630
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001631Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001632--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001633
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001634- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1635 with a custom metaclass.
1636
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001637Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001638-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001639
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001640- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1641 are proxies.
1642
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001643Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001644-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001645
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001646- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1647 very short strings.
1648
1649- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1650 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1651 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1652 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1653 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1654
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001655Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001656-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001657
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001658- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1659 close or delete time).
1660
1661- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1662 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1663
1664- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1665
1666- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001667 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001668
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001669Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001670-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001671
1672Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001673-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001674
1675C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001676-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001677
1678New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001679-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001680
1681Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001682-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001683
1684Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001685-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001686
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001687- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1688
1689- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1690 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1691
1692- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1693 deleted at process exit time.
1694
1695- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1696 in backslash.
1697
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001698Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001699----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001700
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001701- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1702 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1703 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1704
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001705
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001706What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001707===========================
1708
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001709*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1710
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001711Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001712--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001713
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001714- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1715 been extensively updated. See
1716
1717 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1718
1719 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1720
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001721- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1722 deleted!
1723
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001724- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1725 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1726 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1727 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1728 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1729
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001730- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1731
1732 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1733 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1734
1735 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1736 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1737 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1738 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1739 supported anyway.
1740
1741 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1742 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1743
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001744- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1745 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1746 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1747 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1748 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001749
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001750- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1751 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1752 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1753
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001754Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001755-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001756
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001757- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1758 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1759 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1760 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1761 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1762 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001763 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1764 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1765 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1766 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001767
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001768- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1769 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1770 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1771
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001772Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001773-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001774
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001775- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1776
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001777Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001778-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001779
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001780- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1781 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1782 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1783 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1784 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1785 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1786
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001787- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1788
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001789- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1790
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001791- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1792
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001793- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1794 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1795 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1796
1797- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1798
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001799Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001800-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001801
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001802- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1803 off a search on Google.
1804
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001805Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001806-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001807
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001808- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1809 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1810 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1811 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1812 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1813 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1814 other platforms should do likewise.
1815
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001816- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1817 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1818 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1819
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001820C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001821-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001822
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001823- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1824 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1825 producing key-value pairs.
1826
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001827- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001828 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001829 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1830 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1831 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1832 previously went unchallenged.
1833
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001834New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001835-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001836
1837Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001838-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001839
1840Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001841-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001842
1843Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001844----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001845
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001846- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1847 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001848
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001849- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1850 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1851 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1852 home.
1853
1854
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001855What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001856===========================
1857
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001858*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1859
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001860Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001861--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001862
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001863- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1864 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001865
1866 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001867 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001868
1869 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1870 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001871 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001872 This needs to be documented.
1873
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001874- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1875 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1876
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001877- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1878 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1879 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1880
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001881- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1882 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1883
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001884- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1885 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1886 class forbids it).
1887
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001888- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1889 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1890 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1891
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001892- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1893
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001894Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001895-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001896
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001897- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1898 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001899 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001900
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001901- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1902 (like 1 + '').
1903
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001904Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001905-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001906
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001907- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1908 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1909 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1910 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001911 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001912 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1913
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001914- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1915 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1916 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1917 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1918
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001919- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1920 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001921 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1922 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1923 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001924
1925- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1926 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001927
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001928- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1929 bytes on its input.
1930
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001931Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001932-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001933
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001934- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001935 convenience function.
1936
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001937- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1938 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1939 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001940 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1941 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1942 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1943 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1944 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1945 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001946
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001947- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1948 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1949 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1950 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1951
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001952- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1953 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1954 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1955
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001956- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1957 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1958 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1959 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1960
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001961- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1962 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001963 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001964 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1965 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1966 new -l and -e options.
1967
1968- statcache is now deprecated.
1969
1970- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1971 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001972 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001973 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1974 time properly taken into account.
1975
1976- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1977 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1978 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1979 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1980
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001981Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001982-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001983
1984Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001985-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001986
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001987- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1988 is built with libdb3 if available.
1989
1990- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1991
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001992C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001993-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001994
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001995- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1996 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1997 PySequence_Size().
1998
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001999- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2000
2001- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2002 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2003 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2004
2005- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2006 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2007
2008- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2009 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2010
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002011New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002012-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002013
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002014- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2015 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2016
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002017- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2018 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2019
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002020- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2021
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002022Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002023-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002024
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002025- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2026 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2027
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002028Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002029-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002030
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002031Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002032----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002033
2034- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2035 removed completely in the next release.
2036
2037- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2038 OSX.
2039
2040- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2041 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2042
2043- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2044
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002045
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002046What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002047===========================
2048
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002049*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2050
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002051Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002052--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002053
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002054- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002055 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002056 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002057 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2058 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002059 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2060 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002061 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2062 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002063
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002064- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2065 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2066
2067- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2068 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2069
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002070Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002071-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002072
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002073- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2074 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2075 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2076 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2077 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2078 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2079 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2080 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2081
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002082- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2083 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2084 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2085 example).
2086
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002087- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002088 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002089 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002090 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002091
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002092- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2093 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2094 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002095 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002096
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002097- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2098 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2099 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2100 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2101 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2102 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2103
2104 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2105
2106 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2107
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002108Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002109-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002110
2111- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2112
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002113- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2114
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002115- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2116 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002117
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002118- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2119 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2120 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2121 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2122 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2123 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002124 attributes.
2125
2126- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2127 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2128 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002129
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002130- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2131 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2132 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002133
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002134- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2135 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2136 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002137 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2138 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2139
2140- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2141 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002142
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002143Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002144-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002145
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002146- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2147 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2148
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002149- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2150 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2151 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2152 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2153
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002154- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2155 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2156 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2157 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2158
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002159 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2160 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2161 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2162 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2163 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2164 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2165 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2166 without losing information).
2167
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002168- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002169 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2170 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2171 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2172 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2173 module).
2174
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002175 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002176 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2177 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2178 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2179 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002180
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002181- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002182 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2183 encoding.
2184
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002185- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2186 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2187
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002188- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002189 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2190
2191- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2192 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2193 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2194 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2195
2196- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2197
2198- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2199 ON, and OFF.
2200
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002201- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2202 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2203
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002204Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002205-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002206
2207- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2208 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2209 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002210
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002211- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2212 been added: -X and -E.
2213
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002214Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002215-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002216
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002217- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2218 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2219
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002220C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002221-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002222
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002223- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2224 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2225 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2226 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2227 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2228
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002229- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2230 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2231 as long) arguments.
2232
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002233- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2234 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2235 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2236 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2237 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2238 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2239
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002240- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2241 input.
2242
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002243New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002244-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002245
2246Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002247-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002248
2249Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002250-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002251
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002252- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2253 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2254 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2255
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002256- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2257 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2258 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002259 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002260
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002261 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2262 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2263 import signal
2264 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002265
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002266 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002267 while 1:
2268 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002269 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002270 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2271 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2272 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2273 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002274
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002275
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002276What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2277===========================
2278
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002279*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2280
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002281Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002282--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002283
2284- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2285 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2286 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2287
2288- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2289 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2290 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2291 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2292 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2293 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2294 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002295
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002296- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002297 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002298 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2299 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2300 associate a docstring with a property.
2301
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002302- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2303 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2304 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2305 other built-in object types.
2306
2307- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2308 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2309 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2310 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2311 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2312
2313- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2314 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2315
2316- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2317 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002318 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002319 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2320 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2321 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2322 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2323 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2324
2325- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2326 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2327 class.
2328
2329- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2330 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2331 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2332 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2333
2334- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2335 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2336 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2337 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2338
2339- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2340 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2341
2342- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2343 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2344 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2345 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2346 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002347 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002348 with the same value as s.
2349
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002350- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2351
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002352Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002353----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002354
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002355- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2356
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002357- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2358 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2359 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2360 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2361 objects.
2362
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002363- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2364 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002365 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2366 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2367
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002368- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2369 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2370 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2371
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002372Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002373-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002374
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002375- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2376 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2377 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2378 by the instances.
2379
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002380- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2381 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2382 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2383
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002384- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2385 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2386 before the entire comparison is complete.
2387
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002388- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2389 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2390 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2391
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002392- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2393 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2394 getwriter().
2395
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002396- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2397 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2398
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002399- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002400 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2401 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2402
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002403- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2404 iterable object.
2405
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002406- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2407 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002408
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002409- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2410 authentication.
2411
2412- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2413 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002414
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002415- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002416 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2417 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2418 a sample driver.)
2419
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002420Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002421-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002422
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002423- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2424 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2425 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2426 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2427 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2428 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2429 kernel has large file support.
2430
2431- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2432 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2433 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2434 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2435 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2436
2437- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2438 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2439 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2440
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002441C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002442-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002443
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002444- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2445 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2446
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002447New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002448-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002449
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002450- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2451 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2452
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002453Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002454-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002455
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002456- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2457 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2458 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2459 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2460 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2461
2462- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2463 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2464 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2465 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2466
2467- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2468 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2469
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002470Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002471-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002472
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002473- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002474 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2475 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002476
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002477
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002478What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2479===========================
2480
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002481*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2482
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002483Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002484----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002485
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002486- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2487 big to represent as a C double.
2488
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002489- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2490 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2491 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2492 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2493 restriction).
2494
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002495- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2496 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2497 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2498 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2499 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2500
2501 >>> dir([])
2502 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2503 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2504 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2505 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2506 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2507 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2508 'reverse', 'sort']
2509
2510 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2511
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002512- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002513 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2514 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2515 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2516 OverflowError exception.
2517
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002518- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002519 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002520 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2521 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2522 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2523 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2524 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002525 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002526 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2527 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2528
2529 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2530 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2531 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2532 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002533
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002534- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002535 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2536 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2537 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2538 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2539 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2540 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2541 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2542 once it is created.
2543
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002544- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2545 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2546 (key, value) pairs.
2547
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002548- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002549 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2550 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2551
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002552- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2553 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2554 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2555 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2556 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002557
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002558- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002559 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2560 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2561
2562 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2563
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002564- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002565 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2566
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002567Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002568-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002569
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002570- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002571 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2572 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002573
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002574- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2575 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2576 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2577 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2578 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2579 in this area anymore).
2580
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002581- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2582 threading.Timer.
2583
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002584- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2585 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2586
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002587- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002588 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2589
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002590- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002591 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2592 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2593 converted to Python longs.
2594
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002595- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002596 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2597
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002598- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2599 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2600 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2601
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002602Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002603-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002604
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002605- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2606 division operators as per PEP 238.
2607
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002608Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002609-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002610
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002611- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2612 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2613 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2614 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2615
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002616C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002617-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002618
2619- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002620
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002621- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2622 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002623 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002624
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002625 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2626 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002627 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002628 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002629
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002630- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002631 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2632 module:
2633
2634 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002635
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002636 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2637 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002638
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002639 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2640 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002641
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002642 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2643
2644 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2645
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002646- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002647 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2648 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2649 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002650
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002651New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002652-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002653
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002654- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2655 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2656 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2657 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2658 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002659
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002660Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002661-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002662
2663Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002664-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002665
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002666- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2667 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2668 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2669 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002670 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2671 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2672 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2673 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2674 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002675
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002676- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002677 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2678
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002679
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002680What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2681===========================
2682
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002683*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2684
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002685Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002686-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002687
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002688- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2689 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2690
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002691- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2692 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2693 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002694
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002695- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2696 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2697 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2698 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002699
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002700- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2701
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002702- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002703
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002704Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002705-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002706
2707- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002708 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002709 the module docstring for details.
2710
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002711Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002712-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002713
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002714- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002715 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2716 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2717 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002718
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002719- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2720 Nick Mathewson.
2721
2722Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002723----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002724
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002725- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2726 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2727 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2728 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2729 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2730 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2731 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2732 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2733
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002734- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2735 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2736 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2737 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2738
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002739- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2740 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2741 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2742 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2743 come a long way).
2744
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002745- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2746 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2747 write filters for these warnings).
2748
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002749- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2750 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2751 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2752 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2753 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2754
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002755- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2756 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2757 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2758 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2759 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2760 older distribution.
2761
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002762Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002763-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002764
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002765- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2766 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002767 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002768
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002769- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2770 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2771 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2772
2773- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2774
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002775- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2776
2777- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2778
2779- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2780
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002782
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002783- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2784
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002785New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002787
2788C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002790
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002791- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2792 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2793 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2794 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2795 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2796 against buffer overruns.
2797
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002798- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002799 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2800 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002801 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2802 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2803 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2804
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002805- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2806 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2807 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2808 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2809 deprecated.
2810
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002811Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002812-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002813
2814- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2815 relevant is found.
2816
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002817
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002818What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002819===========================
2820
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002821*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2822
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002823Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002824----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002825
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002826- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2827 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2828 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2829 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2830 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2831 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2832 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2833 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002834 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002835 repaired.
2836
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002837- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002838 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002839 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2840 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2841 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2842 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2843 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2844 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2845 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2846 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2847
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002848- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2849 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2850 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2851 leading BMO character).
2852
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002853- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2854 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2855 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2856
2857 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2858 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2859 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002860
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002861 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2862 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2863 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2864 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2865 for various simple to use conversions.
2866
2867 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2868 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2869
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002870 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2871 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2872 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2873 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2874 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2875 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2876 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2877 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2878 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2879 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2880 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2881 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2882 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2883 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2884 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002885
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002886- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2887 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2888 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002889 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002890 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002891
2892 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002893 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2894 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2895 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2896 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2897 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002898 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2899 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002900
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002901 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2902 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2903 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002904 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002905
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002906- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2907 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2908 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2909 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2910 floating arithmetic,
2911
2912 x = 9007199254740992.0
2913 print long(x)
2914
2915 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2916 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2917 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2918 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2919 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2920 functions are of good quality).
2921
2922 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2923 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2924 algorithms to break.
2925
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002926- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2927 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2928 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2929 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2930 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2931 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2932 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2933 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2934 order.
2935
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002936- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2937 operation along the most common code paths.
2938
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002939- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2940 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2941
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002942- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2943 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2944 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2945 {}.update(UserDict())
2946
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002947- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2948 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2949 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2950 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2951 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2952 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2953 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2954 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2955
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002956- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002957 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002958
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002959 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002960 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2961 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002962 join() method of strings
2963 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002964 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2965 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002966 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002967 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002968
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002969- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2970 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2971
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002972- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2973 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2974
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002975- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2976 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2977 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2978 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2979
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002980- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2981 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002982 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002983 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2984 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002985
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002986- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2987
2988
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002989Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002991
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002992- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002993 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002994 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2995 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2996
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002997- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2998 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2999
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003000- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3001 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3002 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3003 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3004
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003005- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3006 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3007 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3008
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003009- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3010
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003011- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3012
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003013- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3014 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3015 that are still imported into string.py).
3016
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003017- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3018
3019- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3020 Now it does.
3021
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003022- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3023
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003024- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3025 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3026 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3027 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3028 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003029 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3030 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003031
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003032- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3033 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3034 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3035 'help(object)'.
3036
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003037Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003038-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003039
3040- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003041 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003042 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3043 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3044
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003045- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003046 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3047 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003048
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003049C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003050-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003051
3052- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3053 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054
3055----
3056
3057**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**